The ground, too, was drenched in the color of blood. That goes without saying. A murky, darkened blood.

The river of death flowed through the city, burning the earth, buildings and humans. After losing its physical form, the contents were poured into the land of Fuyuki. Now, that sea of flames, that man-made hell, viciously devoured the world, drenching it in crimson.

But the mass of destruction wasn't absolute: There were beings who withstood the surge of annihilation, individuals who survived that hell by sheer power, skill or simply luck.

One of those survivors was desperately clinging to his life, or rather, to his most primal instinct.

"I don't want to die."

Yeah, that boy no longer had a life to beg for, therefore, the only thing he could do was cling to that little something.

The simple wish to survive, the purest part of the human soul.

In another iteration, maybe the long forgotten gods interceded for him.

Maybe fate rewarded the boy's unyielding spirit with a caring father or a dream to cling onto.

But, this time, the only thing destiny reserved for that boy was a laugh.

A sincere, heartless laugh that found a great rejoice in the unfolding tragedy.

The one responsible of that cruel and pure sound was questioned by a second voice.

"Looks like a baby mongrel survived amidst the flames."

"Oh, I see."

Even with his senses cloaked by the pain and the smoke, the boy could still feel that the owners of the two voices were exact opposites.

The first voice spoke with the majesty and ruthlessness of a tyrant, as someone who experienced all the joy that both earth and heavens could offer.

Was that tragic spectacle just another fruit that the golden emperor would devour for his amusement?

Yet, despite his lack of radiance, the voice that captivated the heart of the boy was the second one.

That empty, hoarsed voice that denied everything.

The boy never asked himself how the voice of a corpse would sound like, but now he was sure of it, it would be exactly like the voice of that man.

The voice of a man who never experienced any pleasure.

Yet, that man was definitely laughing a moment before. That man-made hell was without a doubt a pleasurable sight for the emotionless human.

What kind of contradictions existed within that man's heart? The nameless boy wanted to know.

He wanted to know... If this hell had any meaning.

If his tragedy had any meaning.

Like an act of divine providence, their gazes met.

The nameless boy looked at the dead eyes of Kotomine Kirei.

The priest looked at the empty eyes of the agonizing child.

"Boy, are you in pain?"

The priest asked the question without a thought. It was a natural instinct, the pre-fabricated response of a man who spent his years faking that he cared about others.

"Yes" Faintly replied the boy.

"I see, but that's good, it means you're not dead yet."

The child began to process what the priest just said.

His pain... Was good? The feeling of his lungs burning and his skin sliced by debris... Was good?

At the same time, the priest asked himself a question.

"What the hell am I doing?"

Just a second before, he clearly thought about killing the boy.

He wished to put an end to his miserable life. That tiny, pathetic human that was closer to a corpse wasn't even funny to watch.

Then, why?

Why did the hand that ended countless lives suddenly became so stiff?

Then, he looked back at the boy's face.

"Ah, I see, those eyes." Muttered the master of Archer in his usual, emotionless tone.

It was a sight the priest was familiar with. He looked at the same eyes countless times, always looking back at him with disdain.

That cruel, yet hateless stare that denied not only himself, but everything that this world had to offer. The boy had the same eyes Kotomine Kirei saw in the mirror every day.

"Boy, do you want to live? Your life has been destroyed, your future sent ablaze by a force beyond your control. The senseless, cruel destiny has stolen everything away from you. This meaningless tragedy is the true nature of the world you live in. Still, even in front of the gates of hell, this mechanical mind of yours will refuse to shut down, right?"

"Perhaps that soul and body of yours were made of iron instead of blood and flesh."

"Tell me, lost lamb, do you want to live?"

In response, the boy stretched his hand towards the crimson sky and, by extension, towards the head of the man who found him among the debris.

And, in a way that he couldn't notice due to Kotomine Kirei's location, towards the hole in the sky from which the mud rained down on Fuyuki.

A second later, the boy consciousness went to sleep. Now that he found a shelter in the arms of the priest, the boy's senses began to shut down one after another.

Yet, before everything went black, he heard it one more time.

That laugh, which denied everything, sacred and profane.

The laugh of a man who found beauty in death, a laugh that reassured even the devil itself.

The laugh of a man who would bear no prejudice, who would see everything in existence to it's very end.

A pure sound that accepted everything, that placed emotion over responsibility.

Pleasure over duty.

Humanity over heroes.

----------

The golden-haired heroic spirit looked at the scene, his lips contorted into something that could pass as a smile. He wanted to see what his pupil would do with his newfound joy, but the outcome of the events surpassed even the expectations of the primordial king.

"What is this, Kotomine? A present to your king? But this lowly being is not worth the king's judgment." Replied Archer, infuriated "Flames are a much more appropriate tool to dispose of trash. Let him burn in a place where his cinders won't stain my garden."

"I'm afraid this child is something that I have plundered from your garden for myself, King of Heroes." The golden Servant made an infuriated stare. Despite finding him entertaining, there were limits on how much insolence he was willing to tolerate.

"Calling yourself a thief in front of the king, usually such insolence would be rewarded with a swift death, Kotomine." The blood-colored eyes looked one more time at the burning city. The superhuman senses of Archer could still feel some lives being swallowed by the flames "But I guess larceny is a suitable occupation for someone who has brought the flames of heaven to the mortals."

Gilgamesh made a faint laugh. In the end, this fake that couldn't even be called war bringed him so much amusement. A king should be open-handed with those loyal to him from time to time.

"Stealing from my garden is a capital crime, Kotomine, but a fool who can rid the king of his boredom deserves at least a little reward." The king focused his senses to the world beyond the flames "There are too many of your kind in this era anyway, my garden will do just fine with a few less of them plundering around. Anyway, I'm interested in watching how you, who can only destroy, will create a new life for that mutt."

The primeval tyrant dictated his sentence. The boy's life would be spared by his grace, and become an instrument to bring further joy to the king.

"So, how are you going to call the little mongrel?"

"True, I will need a name for him..." The priest pondered for a while, thinking a suitable name for the existence that was resting in his arms.

The existence that he could crush at any moment.

"Oh, I've found a good one."

"State it." Ordered the king.

"The name of the one who was closer to becoming a Saint in Asia. A pious man who devoted his entire existence to save humans and, in the end, lost everything due to the nature of the humanity he loved so much."

"The child's name shall be Shirou Kotomine."

Well, I came back with another fate fic, hope you like it ^^'

My idea is to tell the story of a fifth holy grail war in which Shirou was adopted by Kotomine Kirei instead of Kiritsugu. I'm sure it must have been done lots of times, but I thought I would give it a try at least.

Also, the main characters have suffered serious changes due to the fact that Kiritsugu couldn't adopt Shirou, which made Sakura, Rin and Illya's lives quite different. It will be shown in the next chapters, so please be looking forward to it ^^'

Also, there will be some changes in the masters/servants who are summoned in this war (Because of Shirou don't having Avalon, stuff that happened to the Einzeberns and Makiri, etc).

Summary: Shirou's attempt to help a woman leads to an assault charge. Shipped off to Tokyo for a year, he seeks to clear his name. A mysterious app on his phone leads him to another reality and others who share his sense of Justice.

Author's Note: This is completely based on my let's play of Persona 5. I named my character Shirou Emiya as a glorious gag joke. All in-game dialogue choices are mine. I'm trying to roleplay in my let's play as much as possible, which means I can't button mash Morgana's head. LOL :(

Also for the pairing, I am OBLIGATED to pair up Shirou with "Fists of Justice!" Makoto Nijima! Fate fans will be a little sad, but Persona fans will mostly squee and shout "Best Girl!"
----

Prologue

Tokyo is a bustling city, with bright lights and a sprawling metropolis. People come and go at night. But there is something that shouldn't be there, a casino, but it is filled with people at the tables, betting money.

A helicopter flew overhead, flying past a bustling casino with bright lights and a bustling crowd of people inside, betting chips and gambling on card games and slot machines and roulette tables.

A man knocked over his stack of chips as he looked around, he thought he saw something above him.

Above that man, leaping around nearly unseen is Shirou Emiya.

Shirou Emiya is many things. Shujin Academy's Brownie, the top of his class, a felon, delinquent, and a Mage. But right now, he's not any of those things, he is…The Joker, the Phantom Thieves of Hearts' leader and he's going to pull off another heist.

Shirou Emiya dashes across the ceiling form atop lights and rafters, he moves with agility, style, and grace, happy that all his faceplants on the treadmill honed him into an athletic phantom thief.

He lands atop a light, holding the metal wire attaching the light to the ceiling, making himself visible to the crowd below.

He's dressed head to toe in black, wearing a trench coat and red gloves; the mask over his eyes conceals his identity from the onlookers below.

Clutching the Treasure, a suitcase, he smirks down at the security as people finally start to notice the person above them.

Shirou jumped across a row of lamps and on top of a casino sign, he climbed up onto the balcony.

"Stop right there!" the guards called to him.

"You won't get away!"

Suddenly, they transformed from normal-looking humans into hideous demons.

"Take 'em down, Joker!" Oracle called to him as Shirou turned to face the one behind him.

Shirou leaped into the air and somersaulted over the guard, landing on his face as he ripped off the mask, revealing the guard's true form as a Shadow, blood, and ooze dropped down to reveal the hideous Sacrificial Pyrekeeper.

"Comparing power levels: No threat. Get him, Joker!"

Shirou gripped his knife and prepared to fight. Without any hesitation, he pulled out his gun and fired seven shots into the Shadow as it winced in pain from the gunfire as Shirou critically wounded it.

Quickly, he summoned his Persona and unleashed an Eigaon spell on him. "Go down!" he called out to them.

Unfortunately, it wasn't enough to kill the shadow.

"Damn it! Payback time kid!" the Sacrificial Pyrokeeper snarled as it reared up and unleashed an Agilo spell on him. Shirou tried to dodge but wasn't quite successful as he endured the burn, fortunately, his wounds weren't that bad.

Shirou charged forward, swinging his dagger right to left, then left to right in a fancy flourish, he slew the Shadow.

"OK. Pull out before their backup gets here!" Oracle called to him.

"Good. You defeated them with ease!" Mona congratulated him.

Shirou turned and headed for the door his navigator specified.

"More of them? Be careful!" Oracle warned him.

The Shadow guards rushed him, slamming their electrified batons into the ground in the spot where he had just been standing, Shirou somersaulted away gracefully, he leapt above them onto a lamp and onto another balcony.

The words "Victory or Defeat" flashed on a neon sign Shirou couldn't see.

"Joker, behind you! Go through that door!" Oracle instructed him as Shirou moved to follow her instructions.

Shirou headed through the open doors behind him.

"You should be able to get out that way! Hurry! Oracle called to him. Shirou began moving down the hallway.

Shirou made his way down the hall and through the door. He moved down the stairs.

"Tch. We got away from a bunch of those guys in black. But there are loads more of 'em." Skull told him.

Shirou rounded a corner and stopped at the door. "No problems on my end," a guard said. Shirou opened the door cautiously but stopped as he spotted a man through the glass window.

"Where'd they go, Dammit!" the guard swore, he turned around, "I can't confirm the intruder's location!" Then he ran back the other way after looking around.

Shirou round another corner but heard Oracle stop him.

"Up ahead, stop!"

Shirou darted behind a bin and waited for the guard to pass by.

"This is bad, hide, Joker!" Oracle warned him.

Shirou ducked behind the bins he darted in a zigzag pattern until he was hiding near an agent.

"Hey, are you sure he came in this way?" the agent asked. "Understood. I will continue the search!" The agent ran off and Shirou took the opportunity to sprint away.

"Now's your chance! Head for the stairs!" Oracle told him, Shirou did as she said and sprinted up the stairs.

Shirou, or Joker, the phantom thief, stared down the hallway. The wall was plastered in papers that had various slogans on them. "victory", "Everyone's Enemy", "Success, success, success", "Winner take all," "Everything in black and white", "Victory addiction", "Double-Faced", "Losing is not an Option, and "Death Penalty" were just some of the papers posted on the walls.

Shirou ducked over to the other side and peered through a window.

The security was looking for him on the cameras.

"He's not alone! Find them and kill them all!" the head of security shouted into the phone.

Shirou ran up the stairs, pursued by agents as he made his way towards where he needed to go.

The mage suddenly stopped, grabbing the balcony and looking down in surprise.

"Something wrong? The exit should be just up ahead," Panther told him.

"Through there?" Shirou asked, looking at a stained glass window.

"Nnnh, that's just how it is!" Panther groaned. "After that commotion's the bottom floor's—"

"Completely closed off," Queen finished for her.

"Hey, can you make it?" Panther asked, concerned.

"over there! There's nowhere to run!" the agents shouted as they pointed their guns at him.

Shirou vaulted up onto the balcony ledge and ran around the corner, leaping to another balcony surprising them, he stopped in front of a stained glass window."See ya!" he smiled, diving out the window, spinning gracefully in the air.

He sprinted towards a ladder and jumping up, he started to climb, he would be home free in a minute.

He looked up, only to see a squad of police officers pointing guns at him. One hit him in the face with the butt of his gun.

He fell back on the ground as he was pinned down by police; they forced his hands behind his back.

"Stop struggling!"

"Suspect is secure!" an officer reported to his superior.

"Didn't expect to find some kid," he gazed down at Shirou.

The man knelt down to look at him.

"You have your teammate to thank for this. You were sold out!" the head officer told him as they handcuffed him.

"Suspect confirmed! Cuff him!"

Shirou was forced to take his mugshot.

His prisoner number was P508954TS.

That was only the beginning of his nightmare.

----

"Guess the drug was too strong," the interrogator said as they looked at Shirou Emiya cuffed to the chair in the interrogation room. "Wake him up!"

Shirou's head felt hazy as he felt cold water hit his face. He shook his head, opened his eyes and looked up. The first thing his eyes were drawn to was the camera. Then he turned his attention to his interrogator.

"No dozing off," the man told him.

Shirou struggled against the handcuffs behind his back.

"You still don't get it do you?" the man smirked.

The other man kicked him in the face, "Give it up!"

Shirou's chair fell over and he felt the heavy press of a boot on his face.

"Come on, cooperate. Or what? You want another shot?" the interrogator asked.

Shirou looked directly at the camera, hoping someone would see the police brutality and stop them.

"Huh? What about the camera?" The interrogator asked. "Are you thinking it can be used as visual evidence?"

He grabbed Shirou by his hair and forced the mage to look at him.

"Of course not…" he replied.

"So you're not that dumb," the man smirked. "Which is good, 'cause we get to take all the time we" he slammed his head into the concrete floor, smashing his foot into Shirou's gut, causing the young man to groan in pain and cough. "NEED!"

Shirou was left wheezing on the floor as the agent walked away from him.

"…You should know your place," the man told him as he nodded to the man next to him who came and removed Shirou's handcuffs.

They pulled him up and sat him on the floor.

Shirou examined his bloody wrists, rubbing the raw skin. It hurt a lot, but that was the least of his worries now.

The man handed him a clipboard, "Sign here. It's a confession under your name." Shirou didn't say a word, he pushed the clipboard away from him defiantly glaring at the man."I See. I need your hand to sign this, but…"

He slammed his foot onto Shirou's leg as he screamed; he began to put his weight on his leg.

"I don't care if you end up losing a leg!"

He stopped and handed Shirou the clipboard and a pen.

He leaned into Shirou's face, "Don't expect to walk out of here in one piece. We are going to MAKE you understand…one must take full responsibility for their actions."

Shirou signed the confession and awaited his fate…

----

A beautiful young woman in a business suit carrying a bag walked down the halls of the interrogation room. She headed towards her destination when a pair of men stopped her."Excuse me, this place is off—" the police detective began to stop her.

"I'm Nijima from the Public Prosecutors office," she replied.

"The prosecutor's office? What business do you have here?" the detective sneered at her.

"Nijima-san. I believe this case is no longer in your jurisdiction," the detective told her. "Besides…"

"Are you Prosecutor Sae Nijima?" another man, an older detective asked her. She turned to look at him. "There's a call from your director. Hurry and get it over with. To be frank, you're being an inconvenience."

Sae Nijima heard her phone vibrating and answered it.

The SIU director spoke to her. He sighed, "I thought I told you to stand by."

"I'm responsible for this case, and yet I'm not even being allowed an interrogation!?"

The SIU Director replied, "I'm calling because I knew you'd bring it up."

"I will not be convinced unless I confirm it for myself," Sae snapped at him. "This is MY case."

The SIU Director sighed, "Good luck to you, then. I won't be expecting much though."

"Ah, Prosecutor, I forgot to mention something important. Your time will be cut short. I can't permit you to speak with him for long."Sae Nijima sighed in frustration.

"It's for your own sake. His methods are unknown. After all, we don't even know if it's safe to simply meet and speak with him."

"….I understand," Sae replied, she headed into the interrogation room.

She was surprised to see Shirou; shoulders slumped, hanging his head.

"I didn't expect it'd be you," she told him.

She knew him, he was the young teen who often served her coffee and curry at Cafι Leblanc.

"You'll be answering my questions this time," she told him.

She turned and saw the empty syringe that they had used to drug him.

"Those bastards…" she growled.

"Can you hear me? It seems you've been through a lot," she told him.

Understatement of the year, Nijima-san, Shirou thought, what was your first clue? My face?

"Almost anything can happen here, and I can't stop them," she told him simply.

Astute observations, Prosecutor, Shirou kept his thoughts to himself, he wasn't being completely sarcastic, what she said was true.

"That's why I need you to answer me honestly. I don't have much time either."

She began to question him.

"What was your objective, Shirou? Why did you cause such a major incident? I didn't think it was a prank from the get-go, but I couldn't assemble a case for prosecution."

Shirou concentrated, fighting through the drug-induced haze as he began to tell her his story…

Shirou concentrated, trying to remember something. Suddenly, he looked up and saw a blue butterfly flying near him.

A mysterious voice said to him, "You are held captive. A prisoner of Fate to a future that has been sealed in advance. This is truly an unjust game…Your chances of winning are almost none. But if my voice is reaching you, there may yet be a possibility open to you…"

"The key to victory lies within the memories of your bonds—the truth that you and your friends grasped. It all began that day…when the game was started half a year ago…"

"For the sake of your world's future...as well as your own...you must remember…"

Shirou watched the blue butterfly flutter and vanish into the air.

And he remembered everything…
]]>FanficsGuardianSoulBladehttp://forums.nrvnqsr.com/showthread.php/7895-Fate-Stay-Night-Persona-5-Crossover-Fate-Wings-of-RebellionFate/Prima Noctahttp://forums.nrvnqsr.com/showthread.php/7887-Fate-Prima-Nocta?goto=newpost
Mon, 05 Feb 2018 23:52:05 GMTSedimentary rock has quite a few things in common with humans if one stops to think about it for all of a second. Many individual deposits of...Sedimentary rock has quite a few things in common with humans if one stops to think about it for all of a second. Many individual deposits of sediment contribute to a growing entity; upon which after a certain amount of foundational time has passed, is referred to as an individual among others.

But this understanding is flawed. A layer of rock as well as a human being owes everything it has to its history, to what personally came before it and contributed to its creation. While sedimentary epochs are judged far more leniently in this regard--one such layer may hold a perfectly preserved fossil, another carrying obvious stress indicators of cataclysmic change--humans actively reject any notion that challenges their perceived individuality. Perhaps this is just the most base manifestation of what’s called the “sin of pride”.

In her mind, rocks have it rougher than humans by quite a long shot. Exposed to harsher elements yet without the consciousness and mobility to combat the indifferences of nature, humans remain blissfully unaware of the hardship of the common rock. Most thoughts had no use reappearing in a mind like hers; but in this place the concept was intrusive enough, as a reminder of why she was forced to live like this.

But was forced really the correct term to be using? She didn’t give it much thought. It was moot, after all. She simply continued to gaze upwards toward the lip of her grotto, the gentle lullaby of the tide rocking her back and forth on the sandy seafloor. It was easier to breathe here, if only slightly. The world and its gravity didn’t weigh so heavily upon her underwater, and the small fish that passed through and the various barnacles clinging to the craggy walls were company enough for her.

Stray white hairs drifted in front of her face, reminding her of the one she was patiently waiting for. “Hairs” was really just a term that vaguely fit the concept, as her body didn’t produce keratin anymore. It was a kind of linguistic laziness that was unlike her, but maybe it was just the last vestiges of the humanity she’d left behind exhibiting itself wherever it could.
Still, she was reminded of his beard all the same. And the alienness that he represented to her.

She’d been expecting Medusa. No, not expecting. That word had too much of a positive connotation. Dreading, perhaps. It was inevitable that the Gorgon would appear to her, given her heritage, yet all the same she had held a bitterness against such an eventual occurrence. The truth was, she had nothing to say to Medusa. An ancestor that had had no conscious input in being such an ancestor was little more than a stranger.

An offhand gift to her family by way of Heracles, there was never any powerful emotion attached to the bit of dead snake the queen of Tegea received that day, at least not from the perspective of the mighty son of Zeus. There were far more important things to think about, course. It was little more than a favor to an ally of war. Yet this prize was coveted and cherished. So much so that it became a part of her family’s being. She was the product of a selfish wish to cling to a meaningless gesture, all thousands of years before her birth.

And yet, she was highly--and, perhaps, happily--surprised when the one that appeared before her was nothing like the monster she’d been expecting. The first thing she noticed when the glowing light had died down was how white his hair was. A shaggy, snow white beard stretched down to rest between his wide-set chest. The hair curved up along his rugged cheeks, topping his ears to circle around his very bald pate. He was clearly elderly, at least in comparison to how most of the beings like him composed themselves. His age was nothing more than a number, given the extreme context of his body, she knew. Barrel-chested and rippling with muscle, he was in far better physical condition than men half his age with twice their power. His clothes were simple, and he wore nothing on his feet. Pale skin exploded into ruddy patches on his nose and extremities, unable to hide that he had once been quite comfortable living under a hot sun.

Harsh blue eyes regarded her, and then he asked that most fateful of questions.

“「 」”

She gave her answer.

“Know then that I am one who shall protect thee, Master.”

He hadn’t given her a name, or anything to call him. It was fine, she hadn’t either.

----------------------------

200 million years ago, the supercontinent of Pangea fractured into the beginnings of the continental tectonic plates. It was at this time, so early in the formation of the “modern” planet, that Greece began to form. The Cyclades, Dodecanese, Ionians, Sporades, as well as the more famous individualist islands like Crete, all began from a common coastline that remained relatively unchanged until the wandering earthen giants slowed and eventually halted their million year journey. To put it simply, then, Greece has been a hub for historical achievements long before the species known as humans even came into existence.

Greece has the privilege then, due to being a launching point for civilization, of having its historic and prehistoric history verified mostly without a shadow of a doubt. It’s only in the modern age, ironically, that Greece as a whole has fallen by the wayside. Massive national debt and various other contributing factors caused Greece to withdraw little by little from the historical limelight. A phenomenon that allows the archipelago to once more drag the familiar misty blanket of mystery around its rocky coasts.

Which quite suited the ancient line of Greek mages just fine.

Modern political violence meant nothing to beings who had long left non-magical society behind. If anything, useful idiots were strategically deployed to cause trouble in certain parts of the country for the puppetmaster’s own personal gain. While the younger members of the Mage’s Association snickered around talk of the mighty families produced by the islands, those with more far-reaching memories were able to recall the staggering contributions to magical society Greece has made in the past.

However, one such embarrassment was potent enough to plague even the staunchest of Greek mages. Whether it actually happened or is simply a myth is a point of contention, but the truth is irrelevant. Simply the rumor of the failed Greece Subtype Holy Grail War is enough for some to stake their reputations on disproving it. Because the truth is the Greeks haven’t presented anything groundbreaking to the Association in a very, very long time. Old rumors popping up like lesions at a time when their influence is on the wane is seen as one of the worst things that could possibly happen.

The story goes that the war had been a disaster from its inception. Greece’s disproportionately vast concentration of immensely powerful Heroic Spirit material proved to be a detriment to the order of the war itself. Mages were desperately slaughtering each other publically for any relic of Heracles they could get their hands on, leaving a sizable number of bodies already before the war had even officially started. After Heracles, the process repeated for the nearest relic of Achilles, and so on and so forth. Eventually, after some form of conclusion that was never made even the slightest of public knowledge, elder patriarchs from every influential Greek family gathered to impose a special regulation set on any future Greece War.

Called the Dσdeka Parapαno, or Twelve Above, the regulations sought to criminalize the summoning of a selection of Greece’s 12 most famous heroes within the confines of the country; under the notion that to do so with such famous figures, combined with the natural homeland bonus provided, would make each of the singled-out individuals completely uncontrollable. While it was true that the Greeks realized the potential terror of a maddened Heracles boosted to godly levels of power, the Twelve Above was much more of a political peace treaty than anything else. Wasting time and effort squabbling over catalysts had a proven track record of destroying reputations and previous family alliance; it was better to simply avoid the whole trouble of it. Both the Church and the Mage’s Association were notified of the Twelve Above’s passing, and Greece instantly lost any appeal as the site of a Holy Grail War.

Which begs the question of how Greece obtained a copy of the Grail in the first place. The answer lies only with the mysterious giggling White Woman who spread the secret of the ritual across the world like the intoxicating poison it is.

----------------------------

She pulled herself out of the rocky grotto, onto the rather out of place tile flooring that rimmed the lip of the watery entrance. The expected percussive smattering of stray water droplets echoing across the tile never came, every bit of moisture clinging to her saline body. Her half-lidded eyes had no need to adjust to the dim light of the setting sun that shone in through glassless windows, yet she blinked rapidly regardless. Then frowned.

Her mansion, which sat nestled in a cove on an unnamed island in the Argolic Gulf, was big, dark, and empty. It was also highly familiar to her, necessary given the state of her eyesight. Yet still, there was something unexpected that raised the cilia on the back of her neck, for lack of a more apt term.

He was sitting cross-legged in the middle of the room. His back was turned to her, yet what meager light penetrated the room refused to reflect off his bald head. She never would have known he was there if he hadn’t shifted slightly. Intentionally? Hard to say, but the gesture didn’t go unappreciated. Or appreciated either, for that matter. That he had moved to signal himself to her was a fact, nothing more.

She continued to stare at his back for several more long minutes, willing herself to perceive his frame more clearly, but finding herself unable to do so. She took a single shuffling pace towards him, all residual water from her “bath” having by now been absorbed into her body.

“I require something from you.”

There was no surprise in these words, despite their suddenness. Tension was something she couldn’t grasp very well. If she’d been anyone else, that person most likely would have fallen over startled. But because it was her, and she was she, the words were taken in stride the same way she did everything else.

“State it.” She quietly ruminated on his voice. Baritone, but there was a crackling quality that made her think of a man attempting to speak after not drinking for several hours. Her own was barely a whisper, but she knew he could hear it.

“I require something by which to call you, Master.” The ensuing pause was kept brief.

“You already call me Master, that should be sufficient.”

A longer pause. At least a minute, by her estimations. She couldn’t verify anything, of course, as she didn’t have a clock inside her abode. This wasn’t uncommon either, to have demands made by that being known as a Servant, at least to her knowledge. It almost made their title pointless, if they weren’t so committed to following commands. Maybe she’d been paired with someone ill fitting…

He shifted.

“Regardless, this is what I require.” This must be the arrogance of the elderly that she’d read about, or perhaps there was some other motivation at play. Still, a criminal doesn’t sign their name on the butt on their pistol. It was the same concept, the less she knew about him, and the less he knew about her, all the better. Which is why she couldn’t comprehend why she answered him the way she did.

...

“Cassiopeia.”

She uttered her own name almost distastefully, as though the word itself were taboo. No doubt this was noticed by the man in her house, but the mood simply continued to remain unchanged. A low rumbling escaped him. It was a grunt of acknowledgement. Assent? Dissent? No, such a sound was impossible to discern any meaning from. Losing the initiative concerning the balance of power was a real threat, as the physical power of a magus was nearly always dwarfed by that of a Servant. By several magnitudes. Action, therefore, needed to be swift.

“If you are content with this relationship now that I’ve accommodated your wishes, I have mine own I ask of you to grant. Face me if you address me as your Master.”

…

“Cassiopeia. Master. Allow me to share with you a piece of wisdom: Do not confuse frugality and honesty for humility, many times they do not cross paths at all.”

An inch. His head turned an inch. Though he was no closer to facing her directly, Cassiopeia understood it as the signal of acknowledgement it was. She finally had his attention. His words, on the other hand, breezed through Cassiopeia’s head with not an iota of thought spared for them. Poetry was a useless linguistic conceit, so she failed to comprehend what was said at all. Perhaps sensing he was losing her, the man intoned his head back to its original position. So close.

“It isn’t fit for a man like me to gaze upon the flesh of a woman who is not my wife. Put some clothes on, and I will show you my eyes.”

Oh.

=======

I've been sitting on the beginning of this for a while, some might notice this tiny chapter is just the blurb I included in my Make-a-Magus contest but expanded.
I have a second chapter mostly on the way, stay tuned (?)
Greece is going to be a heavy theme and setting in this piece so apologies to any Greeks if I mess your history/geography up.
]]>FanficsExpresshttp://forums.nrvnqsr.com/showthread.php/7887-Fate-Prima-Noctahttp://forums.nrvnqsr.com/showthread.php/7885-Hope-Love-Legacy?goto=newpost
Sun, 04 Feb 2018 03:02:01 GMT"My name is Olga Marie Animusphere. If you are receiving this message then you have been chosen to be a master. I-I'm begging you to reconsider. My father is waging war against Vandal Savage with armies of heroic spirits at their beck and call. When the association finally get their act together, there will be nothing left in New Chaldea including yourself!"

"If you have any ounce of humanity left in you, please join my fight to bring both of them to justice and put an end to this death matches! You want money? Fame? Power? I can give it all to you!"

"Find me. And when all of this is over, you will be recognized as this country's savior."

It's summer, but instead of the "fun and swimsuits" kind of summer it's the "incinerate your AC like Goetia did human history" summer. Languid from the sweltering sun and alone in a familiar estate, Gudao and 「 」姉さん find themselves desperate to find a way to cool down, or at least, to release the heat that's built up between them... (lemon, tags: swimsuit, ice cream, sweat)

Rafflesiac

Someone once said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. We can now revise that and witness the attempt to imagine capitalism by way of imagining the end of the world.

Fredric Jameson

26ΊC / 79ΊF

My room. There was a dark shape in the ceiling that spoke to you. You saw it on waking, you couldn't avoid it. The liminal state between sleeping and waking sustained by the unwillingness to rise was architectured around that shape. Point zero, for the coordinates of your dreams. And likewise, lying awake you saw it too. At night, whatever night was. Trying to sleep. The shape  you could turn to either side, bury your face in the sheets, but it would still be there and you would see it all the same. A break in the seamless, vacant plane up there which otherwise admitted no detail to the eye at middle distance. White like chalk, or the whiteness of a powdered face. The makeup of a geisha. Strip the face of all contingent content to attain a pure faciality, a cartoon caricature, dots for eyes and mouth; strip that of all redundancy and what is left is a hole. Simple, porous, opening. Strip that of all depth, of the geometry that invites shade into light, and what is left is  a shape. Some kind of stain. Some kind of mould, slime, scummy organicity. It was water damage, wasn't it. Just the size of a coin. How, you would ask. How is that. What does this. This whole last year, two years, however...when had it ever rained? No time that you remembered. Not even to remember the absence of such a memory. Memory dribbled in reverse back to a dim antecedent and it did not rain, not ever. There was the ocean, and the sand, and there was the heat. And it did not seem  it wasn't a question of probability, but rather of the conditions of possibility. The shape spoke to you. What did it say?

I open my eyes and see nothing. Closer examination  you stood on the bedtop as sunlight fell in across it, mattress indenting beneath bare feet, linen sheets swallowing the ankles like curved space near an object of extreme mass  understood the ceiling to be chalk or a similar calciferous material. Coated in it at least. Formed of the fossil skeletons of micro-organisms. These had been, really, the barest of bare life. Inoffensive machines that once photosynthesised in the heart of the sea. Then they had died, i.e. they had as if in one monumental breath clawed through the veil of the absolute and abolished their meagre individuality, abolished history, abolished suffering, senescence and death. Beyond the horizon of extinction they became naked matter without name or number or particularity. Thus, thereafter, raw material. For the ceiling. The stain lived  if it lived  on the 2D ossuary, the flattened charnel-house of its distant relations. The boneyard. Life endured as an island on the sheer surface of death, however pitifully. A perfect negative of the skull-in-pampas-grass, a familiar theme in artwork inspired by the tenets of Zen. It was not, "remember you will die," but rather "remember you will [continue to] live," in the sense that consciousness is karmically bound to be reborn indefinitely until it is liberated. Where the former anticipates impermanence [無常], the latter invokes the ineffable [幽玄] in that, contrary to intuition, it is not strange or unnatural at all that life should persist after death. There is nothing inexplicable about the phenomenon of rebirth. Rather it is the world of the living, the realm of form and desire and therefore mortality, that is strange and in need of explanation.
I only remember there was some accident. The makeup of a geisha. Its obscene corollary: eliminating the contingencies of the face only permitted their restoration from out of a glossary of perversions. With eyes closed, powdered lids  how delicately they are held closed, not at all fluttering, so like the jaws of a carnivorous plant  attaining fusion with the plane surface of the face, and the mouth opened to a pleasantly rounded O. To feed her something cold! An icecream or sorbet, held on a chilled silver spoon. Expectant breath would condense on the underside. The little shock that would run through her when it first passed her lips. She'd hold the metal fast and deep inside her mouth, accustom to the cold, toy with it, with a curling of the tongue, and how her features would soften as the contents liquefied inside her. With girlish delight. As if there lingered between skin and skull the girl, mother of the woman. Later you collapsed back onto the sheets. The spongy mattress impressed  with subtle oscillations damped. Your thoughts wandered this way. The brightness of the sun cut against your eye. Light flooded through the windows and the heat it brought was uncomfortable. Denied any recourse to sleep. Moreover you had a headache, or something brought about by dehydration, some kind of electrolyte imbalance in a sensitive place. Staring up at the stain on the ceiling a sudden twinge of arousal led you to contemplate it  no longer as mouth, nor sex nor anus but rather as the Platonised pure Hole devoid of particularities, the oceanic [w]hole, the bestial ur-orifice surmounted by a shimmering & amorphous figure...some kind of animated cubist portrait, sample after biased sample of pullulating thighs and arse and lower back not so much stitched together as interlaced like the fingers of siblings still young enough to sleep together. Head pressing back deeper into the pillow you arched up, heard a faint crack, some knot from poor posture unwinding at the base of the spine. Stretched like an animal. Ran a pale hand up under your shirt to the opposite shoulder and yawned like that, then down alongside to the ridge of the iliac crest. It was in some way compounded by the impossible character of this instantiation, the stain's flatness viz. high degree of conformity with the plane geometry of the ceiling. You spent about fifteen minutes lazily kneading your dick through boxer shorts. Pulse quickening, somatic fever. Affect squeezed like a moist rag. In arousal the perceptual field shrinks to the scale of an induced delusion. Reality unveils itself in a different way.

Everyone ran for safety as best they could. The stain was a void, you thought, in the total cartography of the world. You had come to the bathroom. There was a profusion of slate tiles around you, a skylit jigsaw of ceramics, hard and soft angles, with a stainless steel faucet. And soap untouched, still in its paper wrapping. The cabinet beneath the sink held neatly folded towels and nothing more. Not a bathroom you could imagine living with for long. Its comforts were anonymous. Luxury without history. You had come to a place without memories. To a resort hotel. After finishing you stood blearily watching the phlegmy filaments of semen that hung in the basin of the toilet like the white of a half-cooked egg. As if there was some method of divination. You flushed and a feeble spit of water came down and tried its best to take them away. You washed up, but the tap at the sink gave only a trickle and soon drained out, the pressure gone entirely. Drying hands, you found yourself in the mirror. That boyish shock of dark and messy hair. Bloodshot eyes. Mouth fallen slightly open. Squinting as if to present the dark strokes of skin beneath your eyes where the epidermis pulled oily and translucent over tiny purple capillaries webbing out faintly as the river systems of a fantasy kingdom. You were sweating, though the air was cooler. There was something here that  a faint click of the tongue  failed to correlate. It was minutes before you found it. There. Hanging from somewhere above the hairline, draped over the eye, caught in lashes like a delicate petal snatched by an insect. Was a hair. Dark in colour, straight, and long. Far longer than your own. And it had been there. Far, far longer. Without your knowing. And you and you shuddered. And again you asked, the mirror mouthing lines back like a disinterested understudy: did she 「 」 you? And the answer, again, was yes. But this was trivial. A prerequisite of the question's being asked. It was an equation with multiple unknowns. Given that she did 「 」 you  yes, indeed, the dash here should be longer than the radius of the Earth's orbit  solve for (a) she, (b) you, and (c) 「 」. If you could. You turned away from the mirror, and the mirror turned away as well. Solve, if that was possible.

I just can't remember what happened to me. Now to slip into the kitchen or what passed for the kitchen, your leaden limbs staggering downrange. You yawned once again. A miniature fridge, a compact assembly palpably suffixed -ette at the rim of an unlived-in lounge room. Rattan furniture, a long couch on sanded tiles framed before French windows opening onto a sunlit terrace beyond which was only the beach. Saw a glimmer off the sea. Something like the distant flash of a camera. You turned away. You found the sink and tried the faucet there. The result was similar to that in the bathroom. With water dry...the endorphins from earlier peeled away to expose a mounting paranoia. As if a message was relayed here, just for you, a sign channelled from somewhere far away, written in absence, ideograms of unbeing, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea. The mini-fridge was silent and when you opened the door a crack there was no light inside, and you quickly closed it. And power amiss. Inevitably the failure of basic technological systems could not be accepted for what it was. It would be perceived as a metaphor. These systems  water, power  were constitutive of the lived environment to such a point that their absence entailed a deficit in the world itself. An evil curse or bane placed over the situation. A shadow on the face of the sun. In the eyes of the wise man nothing is itself, everything is a symptom of something else. You understood then that the stain was not a phenomenon that existed as an uncommon application of general rules  of physics, biology, interior design  but rather a suspension of the general rules that underpinned all other phenomena. A pure yet not constitutive exception. Not a requisite vacuum without which the world could not be seemingly whole, perfect, and consistent. The universe could have existed without it, and had done. Then there came the stain. So utterly insubstantial, inconsequential, yet impossible, and for these all the more miraculous. The stain was an uncaused gap in the order of creation. Like a bubble of air spontaneously formed in a deep-sea trench: an impossibility the abyss somehow did not crush. You came to the window, pressed forehead against it, felt a certain coolness on your skin. Your breath fogged the glass. And you closed your eyes, and listened. Outside there were the liquid sounds of trees in wind, and there were cicadas in the trees, and other insects, and now and then the cries of sea birds shot through. And behind all that, distant waves breaking on the edge of the reef. And you opened your eyes. And you and you and you and you and you

And though it may have been a shadow trapped out there among the coral, the scuttling crabs and barnacles and iridescent shells and matted weeds and eyeless molluscs under rocks and echinoderms dumbly safe in their immortality

and though

it might be

you It saw flickered something in that the was eye. not

And it was gone. there.

28ΊC / 82ΊF

Deja vu. Her[e] bleached coral had been crushed, compacted and laid out in unsealed paths onto which overspilled ferns and palms and others wracked by vines you couldn't name. Between the path and the beach were the villas, the bungalows, modular materialisations of a fantasy way of life, simulacra of something that had never really existed, entailing all the comforts of home, indeed greater comforts, impossibly sustaining itself on the surface of an island, a beautiful desolation  all kept at intervals rendered opaque in flora so as to lift from tenants the burden of acknowledging the existence of other guests. This was a place like that. There ensued procedural investigations along the bungalow axis parallel with the path, gliding wordlessly through identical, isolated holiday-homes  none was locked, your passage could nowhere be denied  not to check but rather as if to confirm that there was nobody there. Or perhaps you were simply entering and exiting the same house over and again. At the end of the line you found the main complex of the resort, a split-level structure in wood cladding and tinted glass doors, an ordered set of ice-cream colours too large to be seen entirely. Certainly modern, to within certain tolerances, though displaying indications of a decade or more of half-hearted maintenance. The terrace surrounding it on every side was from the lanterned extremities inward strewn with abandoned plant matter and the sweet smells of rot from fallen seed pods  failed fruit  and plumeria flowers, some so pristine they not yet begun to wilt, all five cupped petals persisting in the sheer moon-like whiteness that shaded to gold at the core. There were insects fluttering  pale white butterflies or cabbage-moths  fleeting low and silent across the ground. You saw these things in false-colour  as if film sensitive to spectra ordinarily invisible had transposed impossible shades to something you could understand. Warm air rose from the earth. It seemed that the heat of the day now first began to make its proper introduction: sunlight pressed down on your head, a warmth gathering at the roots of the hair. At the skin of the scalp.

Alone. Nearby you found a tennis court hemmed in by tall chain-link fences. The net had been cleared away, probably into the locked outbuilding adjacent, and the field was left bare. Painted white lines described the territories of the game, but now the game was all over and these demarcations had no clear meaning. The whole thing seemed washed-out in the light. Standing in the centre, equidistant between the two solitary posts at the midpoints of either side of the court, you felt the pressure of the hard, abrasive surface  returning to your feet the equal and opposite force implied by your own weight. Your footsteps did not echo here. The sky opened above you, blue and white and bright and infinite. The wind whipped through the trees. To be alone in an empty universe, you thought. To be totally free and unconstrained by the presence of others  for a constraint their presence certainly was. Here the pressure imposed by other minds was removed and your own consciousness was thereby evacuated, vomited out like the stomach of a feeding starfish, expanding to fill its container. Reality and fantasy attained to a one-to-one correspondence. Yet in the absence of the perspective of others which so constricted you, the solitary perspective you could bring to bear was partial and incomplete from the outset. The gaps in your vision, like vacancies in the resort, were populated thereafter by anxieties which were ineradicable contingents of consciousness. They flickered in the eye. In the shade of trees, the gaps at the corner of vision. Blind spots. Even if this place was burnt and utterly levelled to a desert plane upon which no form could endure and nothing could hide  even then you would not be free of the fear of the point directly behind your head. You yourself were incomplete. The void was in you from the start. Under the shaded eaves of the outbuilding a chalkboard was strung up for scoring matches. It had been erased and overwritten. The number [2 1 0 1], in a flowing hand that was not your own. Two one zero one. Two thousand one hundred and one. Twenty-one oh one. You knew it was a message, but you could not understand it.

30ΊC / 86ΊF

Familiar estate. Incorporated behind the dark windows of the main building was something ancillary. A shop, a sales desk, an empty register. And there they were, suspended from the ceiling of this inset kiosk like so many coloured wind chimes, strung out on racks like the preserved skins of predatory animals, fitted seamlessly to the wax-like carapaces of headless, limbless mannequins. These were bathing suits of many and varied designs. Sarongs, you noted. Side-ties. One-pieces. Others you could less easily name but knew from sight from where? Complexes of overlapping thongs of material, knots, fasteners, cut-away sections specified by precise mathematical descriptions. A whole topology of concealment here exhibited its possibilities in some teeth-grit attempt to exhaust  as [if] it was the exhaust of an industry incentivised to seek the novel yet hemmed in by the very formal constraints of its product. What appearance of novelty it attained to was rather an artefact of combinatorics. You saw this in the colours and shapes alike. Arabesques, tilings, gradients, motifs animal and vegetable and thoroughly abstract, ideograms, solid shades, variant textures, microfashions set to scatter as soon as they blossomed. As if the whole archive of patterns accreted by humans over millennia was here recycled, remixed, cut up and rearranged, transposed into flattened, waterproof textiles. As accessories. The past like a flower pressed onto the vitreous slab of the present. You saw all this. This embarrassment of riches. Hazukashii. How to choose among these? How could anyone? And she 「 」 to you, her hand in yours, voice fondling at the ear: that you were mistaken, that their purpose was not to conceal what ought to be concealed but rather to create the desire for that concealed 'something'. Did you understand? The bikini was not there [Sha-ri-shi] to prevent you from seeing her nipples and her cunt &c. but rather to incite in you the idea that there was anything [particularly interesting, attractive, arousing] to see beneath it. She sanitised her appearance to inv[ent/ite] the dirty minds of others. What about this one, she 「 」 to you. Do you like it? How do I look? And you and you and you realised the choice was in the last analysis arbitrary. There was one to suit every taste.

In pursuit of [a][more] littoral hermeneutics. You were later on the boardwalk, the curving promenade dividing the resort from the beach proper. The lingering scent of chlorine was caught on the breeze here. The adjacent swimming pool had been drained, its internal steps descending only to a pale dry surface where salt had lightly crusted. Like fine ash or milled bone. What few distended shadows troubled that interior were cast down vertically  the sun was directly above, radiance extending its sheen across half the sky or more. From the edge of the boardwalk, your feet pausing arched on varnished decking, you were able to look down to the beach. Across soft sand strewn with shells and shards of charcoal sloping down gently to the waterline. Here the reef began. Beneath air glazed the acrid blue of bathroom tiles. From this vantage point geography impressed itself upon you: you felt its teeth at your back, its fingers at your spine. This was an island, you realised  a realisation came to you, all at once, an aerial photograph cast immediately to the base of the brain. Such that you could see it. This island was, by estimation, about eight hundred metres on the long axis, the vegetated and architectured protrusion above water of the larger coral plateau upthrust from the ocean floor within which it sat like a gentrified pupil embedded inside a vast blue-green iris. The tide had gone out substantially and the slope of the beach no longer perfected itself in lapping waves that did not so much break as crumble  now instead it merged into a terrain of appreciably higher complexity. Neither fully land nor water, but  you manoeuvred your body (and was it not so strange to do this, to be a thing that had a body, after all?) over the edge of the boardwalk and walked across fine white sand that folded in like silk at the impression of your bare feet and soon came down to the shoreline to cross over into  a shallow, liminal, tidal surface of densely interconnected rockpools set among exposed stones thickly embraced by barnacles and shellfish. The water was ankle depth and you found it pleasantly temperate, even cool, though sweat began to run from your forehead anyway, and it seemed as the island receded that traversing these flats was like returning to the earliest beginnings of life on this planet. To the primaeval pools in which the first proteins folded, the first algae bloomed. There were no fish about, not even the little darting silvers you might have expected. Just passive life, mute immortals, specialised plants and reclusive shelled scavengers. You walked for a while. Out and out. As if led by the hand. Smiling wryly to humour her, you told yourself - she who wanted to show you something good. Caustics played on your feet. Crabs drew back into crevices at your passing. The tide, you noted, was still going out. In fact the further one went the more the chaotic mutual interference of the tidal pools coalesced into a unidirectional flow. A palpable drainage. The water was fleeing the island, fleeing the tidal plateau. As you drew near the edge of the reef, sharp coral paining your feet at the touch, a reeking profusion of slime adhering to this surface, detailing it as might the brush of an inhuman artist with colour gradings suggestive of an oil slick or false-colour image captured in deep space...you began to see, as it were, the dimensions of the problem. The reef terminated in an uprush of noise, burbling water overtopping the brim and pouring out from the organic perimeter, and you and you and you and you and you looked [down] from there. Where the shelf of land dropped away. Sloping down and away, gently  barely hundreds of metres over kilometres horizontally. The path [down] to the abyssal plain. Now drying in the sun. Exposed. [...and there was no more sea.] The sea was draining away. Alluvial tracks still carved down the irregular slope, of sand and mud and matted seaweed already beginning to rot in the sun. But the waterline was now miles away. Had moved miles away, since this when? morning. And you and you and you looked [out] from there. And in the far distance, you saw emerging from what was left of the shimmering sea [as if] exposed above water for the first time things structures of steel or husks artifice gleaming in the light.

32ΊC / 90ΊF

Stochastic path. That wasn't it, so you tried again. At a kiosk half-lost in the gloom of the inner building, there stood amid bottled tanning lotion and sun hats and novelty shades and unsold souvenirs a revolving rack of picture postcards. You were turning it slowly to see what would be delivered. And it rolled out before your eyes, this carousel of fantasies, of lies. Their arrangement suggested an obscure ordering principle. Each paper gravid with scenarios. You could not help but look around as you lifted one gingerly off the rack, as it seemed more glaringly obvious, more somatically apparent [real in the gut], now than ever, that you were being watched. From where? It didn't matter. From anywhere and everywhere, and therefore from nowhere. From the point directly behind your head. You looked at the postcard you'd taken  taken without paying attention, even, your groping fingers forming unconsciously an element in a machine geared toward the production of a certain randomness or pseudo-randomness. A roulette wheel, basically. On the card she was depicted reclining in the shade of trees, on a towel thrown down over perfect sand, bone-white, reaching down in the picture's perspective to a sun-drenched sea. In a swimsuit, one you'd seen before. In fact you'd seen everything before. Every element brought together to constitute this picture, from the arc of the bay to the narrow incised horizon to the unblemished blue sky to the aquamarine refractivity of the water - & this is to say nothing of the various entailments of her body, the pose, the splined curvature of hip and bust and thigh, the outfit, the hair so wilfully arranged, the impassive look in the eyes, the lips upturned in amusement so faint as to defy verbal expression &c. - all this you had seen before. You could not say precisely where in each case, but you were exceedingly certain of this overarching conclusion. Each individual element you had seen. It was only this precise synthesis of those elements that was hitherto unseen. The question  of whether there was something additional here, some supplement that allowed the image to be greater than the sum of its parts by dint of their very conjoinment  did not however arise. For it was at the very moment you registered the non-uniqueness of every specific component of the image that you also found yourself enjoying. Enjoying nothing other than the registering itself. You, or part of you, took note as the musculature of your face slowly contorted into a light smile, strangely knowing. You were, perversely, able to observe yourself in the act of enjoyment. And yet  that wasn't it. That, that, wasn't what you [wanted?] were looking for. You replaced the card on the rack, still smiling, dumbly, and you spun the rack again. And you tried again, you picked another. What did you have this time? View across the table, one of those out on the terrace, yes. Night scene, candlelight inflected in the glass of wine, yes. The ornate traditional gown, yes. She was 「 」 directly at you, in the picture. This too  all of this, every highlight, caustic, reflection, every fine cut of colour, the shades in her elegant confusion of hair, the outstretched hand, inviting, indeed the coolness of the evening breeze and the wash of breaking waves heard at the edge of the reef, subjective components merely implied by the image borne by the card  all this, all these, you had already seen or knew from elsewhere. Broken down into atomic constituents, it could be proven that each one resolved as a reference to a hidden antecedent. Somewhere, somehow. Only the arrangement was new  and even then, was it? This ordering principle, this pose, this camera angle, this perspective  this was not new. Rather a combination of pre-existing elements in such a way as to...your thoughts trailed off. Once again you were caught unawares by the dissociated perception of your own enjoyment, and at the same time, with precisely the same intensity, the intuition that you were being watched. A slight tremor had gathered in your fingertips when you replaced this postcard. You gave the rack another turn. Another, another. Why not? Your hand shot out while the rack was still moving. This one  and here your mind could barely begin to apprehend the details  depicted her from behind, wading naked on the reef, porcelain skin cast pearl-white under moonlight, hands outlaid at the level of waist-deep water, the head crooked ever so slightly as to admit a portion of the gaze. And yes, all this, all these  you could no longer perceive the image as a totality, so deep now went the instinct to find in it an interlacing complex of contingent, referential parts  you had seen elsewhere, and before. At this precise moment, in the midst of your wordless enjoyment, you ascertained the function of the notional gaze observing you. Through its observation it froze you, it conscripted you functionally into the servo-mechanism of a stochastic system: yourself plus the postcard rack, entangled. The enjoyment you experienced in the course of this functioning  as if second-hand  was therefore performative in that its outward signs were produced, as it were, for the benefit of the gaze observing you. You disassembled the images into their parts and connected those parts to their referents, and you enjoyed this  because this ability to participate in reference connected you to the gaze that observed you. [You did it to fit in.] Your grip released. The postcard tumbled through the air and landed upside-down on the floor. The number so elegantly written on the reverse was [2 1 0 1].

34ΊC / 93ΊF

Anisotropy. Now through the the restaurant, the tables all packed away, through a forest of inverted chairs adjoining a gleaming silver buffet table...you staggered through in what was not so much a single continuous motion but rather a choppy progression of still frames, jilting from one pose to a next with no in-betweening. You saw yourself as if from behind, as silhouette passing further into the lightless interior. Through a door and darker still. To a place of stillness and surfaces faintly gleaming of stainless steel. The refrigerators in the resort's kitchen had failed along with all other electrical devices, which was no big surprise. Checking them briefly you found that a certain coolness lingered inside. Perhaps no more than a few degrees, but palpable in relative terms. That part of you which was still rational seized upon the obvious deduction, that the amount of time which had passed since the generalised power failure could be calculated from this. But all other signs, occult and unsubtle, hinted at the utter futility of any such calculation. If you were trying to make sense of this, you had already lost.
Persistence of the beach. The decision to leave the island, i.e. to traverse beyond the reef and the defunct structures that had emerged from the receding sea in pursuit of that sea, had been made primarily according to impersonal dictates of thermodynamics. When water evaporated it took in a large quantity of heat from its surrounding environment, such that its component molecules could overcome vapour pressure and undergo a phase change. This quantity was expressed as the latent heat of vaporisation, here equal to a little over two thousand joules per gram. It therefore followed that as the water receded into the haze at the base of the horizon it would leave behind countless pools of evaporand, in the vicinity of which would be found local because ephemeral minima of ambient temperature. As if the earth itself was perspiring. Your behaviour in this place  whether or not it was known to you was ultimately irrelevant, as it was not the kind of action whose direct elevation into consciousness would shatter the unconscious purity thereof nor raise the analogue of a muscular twitch into a nervous compulsion  exhibited all the properties of a contour that traversed the generalised field of temperature in pursuit of differentials. Against the same, you looked for difference, for exceptions. Under these conditions, under the tyranny of a solar presence imposing a rapidly accelerating uniform temperature increase, you were a motile agent set loose on an obscure attractor field. Your path from here on out could be modelled quite accurately by an elegant mathematical description of these dynamics.
42ΊC / 108ΊF

The inventory of the young woman. Returning to your room, and your bed  though since the villas were identical in every respect this could arguably have been any one of an indefinite number of [your] rooms and [your] beds  you became aware of something that had eluded you. The bed was so constructed as to leave a small space underneath, by no means large enough for a person to conceal themselves but certainly capable of hiding a range of small items or containers. Some hitherto unrecognised irregularity in the order of your room led you to the suspicion of an instant that there was something under the bed. It was perhaps a subtle discolouration of the floor, or disturbance of the sheets that did it. The geometry betrayed. You did not truly expect to find anything, and were distantly surprised when you did. Though this too was a vague, delimited pastiche of an emotion. Carefully drawing it out from beneath the bed, where it had lain for who knew how long, you retrieved a broad, thin suitcase, jet-black in colouration and locked with a four-digit combination. Sat it on the bed while you kneeled at floor level. You thought this would take a while, but it didn't. Opening the case required nothing more than a certain capacity for introspection.

Death kit. It contained the following items: (1) A patch of excised skin the size of a CD case, preserved in a sterilised plastic sleeve, (2) samples of hair labelled by site of origin, (3) six detachable noses, (4) high-resolution photographs of a human iris, (5) three sets of breasts, paired at distinct size thresholds, (6) a 500ml bottle of commercial lubricant, (7) square manufacturer's samples of high-quality kimono fabric, (8) a set of sprites commissioned from a niche illustrator, (9) captioned photographs of everyday situations, (10) charts showing the growth of unit statistics in proportion to selected variables, (11) an itemised list of upgrade materials, (12) a dossier of lines to be spoken aloud when specific flags were raised, including possible variations and instructions on cadence and intonation, (13) a cross-section of thickness not exceeding 1mm taken from the blade of a Japanese sword, (14) the text of several pornographic short stories with all proper nouns removed and replaced with quoted empty space, (15) an invoice for dialect coaching in a formal register, unpaid, (16) a chart displaying variations in body temperature, axillary, buccal, and rectal, over a twenty-four hour period, (17) a set of blood pressures, systolic 120, diastolic 70 rising to 200/150 at onset of orgasm, (18) a flowchart for her route, and (19) a slip of paper, hastily typewritten, bearing the words lemon, tags: swimsuit, ice cream, sweat.

54ΊC / 129ΊF

S[u,i]mmer. Delirium. You were supine on the cracked-mud floor of the waterless ocean, vision obliterating itself in the incandescence above, afterimages bleeding as if the subtle capillaries of the eye were bursting one by one. At such a temperature all action, physical or mental, became an intolerable burden. That action proceeded in spite of this took on the character of a natural law, gyrations like the inexorable movement of tides. In the midst  though what could the midst be, in a uniform haze with no centre?  of uninterrupted and torturous warmth the mass of her body atop yours was pure rancidity, decay-heat, skin attaining to the slickness of oil or fat. Groaned, hand shifting to cover eyes. The tongue drew a contrail of saliva down your chest, curling within the navel before lazily caressing the pubic mound. Heatstroke infiltrated the channelled confines of the skull. The skin of your thighs, sunburnt raw, registered dimly the envelopment of your erection. She she 「 」 to you. [hereafter illegible in original MS - Eds.] anterior curve of translucent, milk-white skin [illegible] spine. BENEATH THE SKIN THE SPINE. Compacted strata of dermis hiding cartography of nerve and blood [illegible] crack one by one [illegible] aeons old. As if it had [illegible] tongue [illegible] closed arcade of inner cavities, a veritable rabbit warren [illegible] hollowed womb [illegible] ribcage in which [illegible] hand found hand found yet another surface softer still and faintly [illegible] faster, shuddering [illegible] of semen. Yet the feeling of inner evacuation or hollowness that followed orgasm could not effect a decisive difference in the crushing uniformity of the heat. It was allllllllllll!#6c6c6c6c6c6c6c6c207468656d73656c766 5732073616d65!#!#!#!#!#!#!#!#!#!#!#!#!#!#!#!#!#!#! #!#!#!#!#!#!#!#

58ΊC / 136ΊF

All that is solid. Your entry into the post-historical crash space was gradual. On reaching the base of the island shelf you arrived at a desert and desolate landscape  waterless seascape, rather, a profoundly colourless place, a place of dead coral roads and compacted sediment strewn all about with a thousand kinds of detritus which the surface had forgotten here  where affect and geometry exhibited a cruel complicity and mutual malevolence. Distances became strange. This terrain formed a manifold in obeisance to a curious metric: the shortest path between any two points in space was invariant and non-finite. Rather than a horizon lost in haze and tides of light, you understood a plane surface on which there was ineffably nothing but horizon, above, below, all around. Shimmering, it reduplicated. Reduplicating, it bewitched...consciousness, no, individual thoughts were drawn out like fine wires along these striations. At every point in the visual field your gaze terminated in the linear junction of earth and sky. How, you could not say. Could not even speak. Foot trudged after foot in the drying mud at the base of the sea and with every further motion the surroundings, infected by heat, liquefied by it, recrystallised into novel and disordered geometry. Fractal. No integers here. No motion, no time. Sunset never came. LIKE UNTO THE DENIZENS OF THE PLANE ACCORDING TO E. A. A. WHOSE WHOLE PERCEPTION WAS HORIZON. Compaction of simplex into local manifold. Glome into sphere into circle. Tesseract as regular hexahedron. Such a perspective was entailed here. Allergic reaction: as if a foreign paradigm or realm of experience thoroughly incompatible with your own were extruding itself into the surrounding continuum, forcing violently your body to comport itself to new standards and ways of measurement. Nausea. Quickening of pace. Suddenly  lurching in mammal panic  you tripped over a piece of debris and fell, red-raw palms breaking your fall. Caught face-down on the flats, eyes pressed shut. A griddle to be cooked upon. Sunburnt skin caught fire at the back of your neck. The migraine rising in your head. The blood that listened in your frame. Sweat was diminishing in volume. It was, you mutely registered, ceasing to be produced. Time passed. A year burnt away in a second. Two years, three. You opened your eyes, lifted a failing body to its feet. And the ocean had resolved itself, the horizon, the flatland. Location resumed, after a fashion, to be meaningful. Tried to see what you had tripped on: a large stone, blotchy and stained and dusted with salt. Then you nudged it with your foot, and it tipped over and rolled your way and you saw the crenellated arch of the upper jaw and teeth...the abraded coal-black of pockmarked empty sockets where carapaced things had nestled when there was still water here. Human skull, picked clean. [You rubbed your eyes and elevated your gaze. Scanning about.] There were thousands of them. Thousands...something like a sound rang out across the field, a metallic and pure tone or continuous scream at a frequency below the limit of human perception. The sheer scale of this collection was, you had to admit, impressive.

Silent line. The debris tended to the larger as you moved into the suburbs  indeed it became those suburbs, scattered rubble finding order, regularity, coming to assemble itself into distinct if ruined buildings and streets, the frayed edge of the map giving way to an interior severely water-damaged yet generally legible  of this new conurbation, raised from the silence of the sea. Here at the outskirts you came across remnants of technological civilisation, mainly advertisements. For what it was not clear  damaged by mould or some kind of of adhesive sea life, blackened, abraded and now left to dry in the cruel eye of the sun, the content had been totally erased. The form, however, lingered. Collapsed billboards and eroded fragments of neon tubes heaped like funerary cairns. Base of the information society, signifiers stripped and left for dead. All around the structures exposed by the receding waves were represented as crumbled, salt-rusted assemblies all together forming what had once been, in its own inimitable way, the anonymous cityscape of the twenty-first century. With all other functions inoperable or impossible, the city endured. In the absence of humanity this disordered mass of wreckage  this damaged machine persisted in the very first function it had been given and the last it would ever perform. This was the realisation of a concrete verticality, to pile up time, history, in opposition to the threatening tides that would otherwise bear it away. The horizontal was the enemy, the levelling flatness was the enemy: it was death-drive, the inanimate, barbarism...Time, the destroyer of worlds. The space in whose emptiness all contingent being would be pulled apart, atoms scattered on the four winds to the very ends of the earth. The city was there, you learned, to see the horizon obliterated. To create spaces in which the deep infinity of the sky was subjected to a certain enclosure. Control. This was the greatest and holiest external phenotype of H. sapiens sapiens on the date of its extinction. Peeling from the barnacle-encrusted innards of a crumpled subway car you found a poster even at this late hour betraying the synthetic smile of a model. Those eyes met yours, and you could not help but shudder.

Chop and slice. Rubble piled hundreds of metres deep yet suffused with unattenuated light. As if it were an illuminated room partway filled with broken glass in the crevices of which you proceeded, minuscule and insect-like. Through these and other sweltering byways you pursued the ocean. Through offices caked in briny sediment, passages beneath collapsed towers choked with yellowing kelp, through sunken parking lots, their floors tilted at abnormal angles and littered with the wreckage of the age. At last you found water, at long last. Lowering yourself gingerly through the ceiling of a reeking corridor  four conjoined, variously glass and stained concrete paths spanning out to an ethereal vanishing point  your bleeding feet almost unknowingly interrupted the progress of a rivulet tracing its saline way across the floor. The local minimum of potential. Curious, you followed it. Around turns and down gentle slopes and short stairwells  and it was joined by other streams, other drippings condescending from the intricate megastructure above. The ocean chasing itself. Vast concatenations of sound through the humid air  groaning metal, rubble shifting in the deep. The stream became wider, a discernible current. And at the end of the path abutting a wide balcony it sailed right over the edge, outpouring, arcing parabolic, breaking into droplets, the droplets into mist, falling over and out into empty space. The minor waterfall, gleaming and brilliant, attaining the lustre of molten silver. You had arrived at a vacant shaft, a hollow or cenote which had bored deep into the rubble. Sunlight presented as a blinding, incinerating membrane pitched over the far zenith, precipitating a harsh glare which isolated every suspended particle, every surface detail, and drew out their myriad contrasts and irregularities and refined these until they were incandescent specks in your vision, painful even to look at. And it was in this looking, out across this immense column of light, you found your eye could distinctly divide layers of time on the opposite face. Articulated by a tortured grammar of rupture, intrusion, and collapse  were, unmistakeably, strata. Beneath tunnelled concrete and rebars embraced by reticulations of dry dead kelp you saw worked stone, fallen Gothic arches, catacombs, severed battlements and the wreckage of siege engines and chainmail fallen to rust. Whose channelled insides numberless creatures had picked clean long ago. Below that you began to see veins of marble, cracked pillars, caryatids, inscribed monuments and votive statues with their heads struck off. Your gaze fell further, past the eviscerated glories of an antique empire to the glistening continuance of the hollow...shining in the deep, layers of compacted rubble of yet untold character. Not that you needed to be told. Somehow you knew where all this was going.

90ΊC / 194ΊF

Elanguescence. At this stage you [the subject] began to exhibit the disrupted thought processes  mental elisions, repetitions, haltings and protractions  characteristic of uninterrupted exposure to extreme heat. One of the most pronounced of these and connected symptoms might be termed acute visual agnosia. This referred to the phenomenon of sudden, temporary, yet extremely profound failures of formulation  i.e. of primary cognition, of resolving the myriad lines, shades, colours and shapes that the eye took as its input into discrete and definable objects. Lying on your bed, drowning in heat, you experienced this as a kind of dissolution. The whole surface of your skin like a weeping sore. What at first presented as hypersensitivity  like a pregnant woman, a voice without owner murmured alone on the stage of your undeserving life - as the relentless intrusion of point detail at the expense of the whole, suddenly and dramatically breached a threshold immanent to its own functioning and inverted...thus, therefore, this: the instant at which the world went away. Your eyes, which had hitherto glazed the image of the ceiling into their surface, lost that image...it became a wall, a floor, a geometry, a volume, something at indeterminate distance or without distance at all. An echo on the inner eye. A puttylike amorphousness with dimensions like a dream's awareness of itself. Your raised hand, outstretched  a Herculean effort even to do this much  unresolved itself, to an extrusion of pale flesh-like content, some nightmarish excrescence, all inner pulleys and tensile actuators...ATTACHED to you, God, how could it, this...and thereafter it reached the ceiling, what had been the ceiling, alien schematics splintering and reforming, it in its motion, it dissolved into it, no depth or feeling of depth, dissolving. Turn away. Turn away. To the  the bedside lamp. But this too was fleeing you, already in the distance fading. Stalk and shade and bulb reduced to CAD primitives...space, the pure differential operator of classical theory, was failing to maintain. Was not responding as it should. Dissolving. Integrating itself into the molten plateau of the wall. Image. Shade and light, texture merging, fabric effulgence. Silent convulsions flooded the system, muscles obliterated as part of a general disassembly of the body. Vivisect thyself. Where  alone. Alone in summer. In the heat. Lemon, you thought. Tags...tags. What were  the fucking, where  the tags, they  forgot. Never mind. Summer. They were summer, or the image of summer, the pleasures of summer, beach & shade & ocean blue and unspoken fun. And this  this was the secret. The pleasure one extracts from the heat is predicated on its inconsistency. BROKEN SYMMETRY. Joy in heat precisely because escape is possible. The cool of the ocean and shade and breeze. Perfectly isotropic heat, on the contrary. Heat distributed with incontestable fairness such that no gradient could be discerned whatsoever. Perfect sameness. This eroded the distinction between self and world. Between your body and its surroundings. The barrier of the skin was inconsequential and functionally non-existent. The echo of dissolution redoubled in feedback and built to a spectral howl and you and you and you, you, sweat-drenched, writhing atop the ruined bedsheets you

How long

gently

had it been

dissolved

since you

into

left

the

this

air.

room?

154ΊC / 309ΊF

Staying here will only breed obsession. You should have consulted the ancient texts. In them could be elucidated by careful if unorthodox reading  among other things  the precise confluence of sweat and desire. This was key, critical in fact, though you couldn't say precisely why. Perhaps it was simply the odd one out. Consider the brief. (You considered it.) The tag cluster, the triune specification and constraint. The first two were externalities, objects, props in the scene of fantasy. Essentially dead matter whose investment with libidinal interest adhered to simplistic logics  concealment/prohibition in the case of swimsuits (as already discussed) and semblance/deferral in the case of ice cream. Ice cream stood in for bodily fluids in general and semen in particular  as if you needed to be told lol  and for this standing-in, deferral of the real thing, was precisely more erotic than the real thing. But you were digressing. The matter at hand was sweat. Insofar as coitus was a physically strenuous activity perspiration was to a certain degree always present. It was a 'natural' function of the material substrate upon which sexual fantasies were staged and projected. Therefore to specifically call upon it in this way was to bring a portion, an aspect of that substrate, into consciousness, viz. into the fantasy. As if a floorboard on the stage were to stand up and give a soliloquy. You had to ask: why? What purpose did this serve? Where was the sense in it?

Hairless ape. Preliminary investigations had revealed that the fetish-value of sweat tended to operate along two major pathways: visual and olfactory-gustatory. The former understood sweat as a distinct mode of articulation vis-a-vis the geometry of the skin. Diaphanous, inspired by light, the glistening of sweat surveyed the potentials of the body in the aspect of pure surface. It thus dovetailed with technologies of bodily training and discipline that took the pure surface, the statuesque body, as their object. This included almost all forms of physical exercise practised within the industrialised world at the time of writing, as well as many forms of physical play, insofar as play has been internally colonised by the normative demands of exercise. Fetish-value along the visual pathway therefore constituted a mode of appreciation of the body within the frame of apperception these technologies afforded, viz. it coded the object as sexual athlete and invited speculation on the possibilities their body facilitated as a result of the appropriate disciplinary regime it laboured within. The latter  the olfactory-gustatory pathway  was, by contrast, characterised by intent focus on the interior or putrescent body. Notwithstanding a certain internal differentiation, as the olfactory pathway tended toward the fetish of sweat at point localities (underarm, groin, &c.) while the gustatory pathway undertook a more general approach oriented toward surfaces (TASTE_THE_SKIN_), they existed not as a dichotomy but rather on a spectrum and were mutually unified by their underlying characteristic, the identification of the superficial body as a mere porous barrier through which the substance of enjoyment was precipitated. This had been linked with the Freudian oral stage (Taikan 1987) insofar as the body of the object became wholly or partially identified with the breast viz. that of the mother. And so on. What the visual and the olfactory-gustatory pathway had in common  and therefore what could be said in general vis-a-vis the fetish-value of sweat  was their conceptualisation of sweat as a confession, a disclosure, of the body, of the visceral reality of the object. Visual  through outlining, highlighting the statuesque surface. Olfactory-gustatory  through scent and secretion of the putrescent interior. Of course, in either case, and this must be emphasised, in the operation of the fetish one did not penetrate to the hidden kernel, to the truth of the Other. Like any fetish it was the displacement of desire onto a plane of consistency attached to yet safely distinct from what it ostensibly apprehended. In this case the visceral 'reality', the pullulating flesh, the body of scents and tastes and definition, remained an idealised projection of same. In this way the fetishist sutured the impossibility of the sexual relation and made it comprehensible.

282ΊC / 540ΊF

Where does this ocean go? The optical feed suddenly cut out. Probable power failure. In a minute it was restored. Through glitches restored  something else. Unfamiliar. Channel change. What at first seemed an aerial view of alluvial terrain, ridge lines and eroded gullies caught in the cool false-colour of electronic optics, in a short while catalysed its own correct perception as linen, fine silk, softer than skin. It was a still frame showing, magnified, the margin of kimono and obi. Complementary shades and patterns met at a border that seemed formed by nature  a river dividing twin provinces of a universal empire. Cut. Second frame. Now it was a close-up, detailing in extremis the delicate assembly of the wrist, the twisted stem of a porcelain flower. There was movement in the hand, implied beneath the skin of the forearm. Cut again. To dyed fabric enfolding the subdued swell of the breasts. At this level of detail every fibre was visible. Cut again. Screen-filling close-up of hair, straight, aligned vertically, falling down like the charcoal-black striations on the inside of a blast furnace. Beyond this point the cuts became too fast to distinguish individually, soon exceeding the screen's refresh rate. Flashes flickering. You gathered that some attempt was being made, either to decompose a certain totality into parts which were each more or less palatable, or to gather up the scattered pieces of that totality in order not to reconstruct it  for this was infeasible, the whole never failing to escape the finite sum of its parts  but merely to gesture at its existence, to refer to it without referring to it. Concerning that of which ye cannot speak, remain silent. She stood nearby, she 「 」 to you. Say, do you think I should cut my hair? 596f757220686169723f. Yes. With the heat it has been becoming troublesome, you see...496e207468617420636173652c20737572652e20446f 20776861746576657220796f75206c696b652e

522ΊC / 972ΊF

Zero sister three. //////////////////////////PERSONALITY BODY SUFFICE AS MY 「 」, CLOSE WE WILL MEET AND PROTECT YOU WANTED TO ENJOY AN IMPERFECT FORM SOMETHING HOW CAN THIS SHIKI IS HERE AS CANNOT SLEEP THAT IS DAY WHEN EVERYONE IS 「 」 AND FOLLOWS 「 」 SIDES SAME SUPPOSE DOLLS CANNOT HELP YOU WAKE UP FROM IF YOU ARE TO YOU DOWN IT ENDS NEVER TAKE SHIKI'S PLACE INDEED? NEVER GAVE HOPE THAT WE UNDOUBTEDLY REAL THANK ORDER TO SAVE YOU FORGET EXISTENCE LONGING IF IT IS BECAUSE UNINVOLVED IN NUMEROUS BIZARRE MY 「 」, REGARDLESS THIS IS SOMETHING THAT HER, IT WOULD BE SUNRISE, 「 」 TO YOU, SUPPOSED TO GIVE CELEBRATORY VERY WOMANLY INDIVIDUAL, BUT AM USE KIMONO, RYOUGI SHIKI TO IT 「 」! NOW THEN WILL NOW, WHAT EVEN WHILE BEING OMNISCIENT, CHANCE TO WATCH YOU NAME, RYOUGI SHIKI KIMONO, RYOUGI SHIKI AND ASSEMBLING EIGHT THEORY MYSTIC BEING MERE ILLUSION, BIT LONGER 「 」 TRANSIENT DREAM WHILE YOU SLEEP WERE HOW MANY HOLES 「 」 SEPARATING RYOUGI, BEING PERSON HERSELF IN YOUR MEMORIES TO REMEMBER AN EXISTENCE, SHE MAY SEEM LIKE ATTACHMENTS WAS ONE IN YOUR MEMORIES ONCE AM NOT VERY IS YOUR FAULT, 「 」 NAME, SHIKI, THIS INDIVIDUAL AS MY 「 」, HOWEVER REMAIN HERE FOREVER, IF CANNOT SLEEP THAT YOUR COMMAND SPELLS, KNOWING ABOUT THEIR FULL HER DEATH SHIKI CAN'T SUPPOSE CAN GO HOPE THAT LEATHER JACKET OVER DREAM THIS IS EXISTENCE ORIGINATES FROM 「 」 ANY MANNER MISTAKE TRANSIENT DREAM WHILE THAT GIRL GIRL BEING SOON PART WAYS HAVE LIKE VERY WOMANLY DOWN HOW DANGEROUS BUT THERE IS SOMETHING SHOULD DESIRE IT YOU YOU STILL WE CAN WE NOT? HOW IS MIDDLEMAN THINGS THAT SAKE GRANTING GIRL BEING NAME, SHIKI, THIS WHEN EVERYONE IS ASLEEP IT FRUSTRATES ME TO ME CHANCE TO IS VERY CALMING WE SHIKI, AND RYOUGI SHIKI PERSON INTEREST IS BE AN ILLUSION THAT ALWAYS ALONE AT NIGHT BE PLEASANT APOLOGIZE COULD MEET AND LIFE BE PLEASANT LIFE BE PLEASANT THIS? WILL STRIKE WILL CUT THROUGH BE ON SNOWY THIS? HOPE IT NOT VERY GOOD WITH TRUTH SHIKI HOWEVER, SHE HAS SAME COIN JUST MY CREEDS, BUT HOW CAN THIS BE!? TIME WHERE ARE UNDOUBTEDLY REAL RYOUGI SHIKI, AND RYOUGI THEN WHAT SHOULD BIRTHDAY! HAPPY BIRTHDAY, 「 」! KISSES, RIGHT? NEVER GAVE IT SHIKIGAMI IN OTHER WORDS, SAME PERSON AS LET US GO BUT THERE IS SOMETHING ME, BUT FEEL WOULD DESIRE TO TAKE IRREGULAR SINGULARITY, IS FINE, NO? WHAT TWO SIDES TO THINK THAT SEE ME, SO PLEASE SEE SHIKI IS HERE WHAT SHOULD LONGING AND RETURN ARE JUST LIKE LIFE AND SHE WILL LEAVE NO WORLD RYOUGI IS BE MISSING OUT ON DEATH USING THEORY MY PERSONAL PREFERENCES HAVE AS IF MIGHT WILL CUT THROUGH THEM//////////////////////////

538ΊC / 1000ΊF

Omega station. At the end of the long mass of rubble, the buildings husked and broken open like spines, tough ligaments of steel dried and cracked dustward in the heat, the chasms sheared through antique palaces and ossuaries, the splintered galleons and the treasures of the pharaohs and the cities of myth and the fortresses manned by men whose very bones were now ash, from all of this heaped over a vast area like a discarded pile of bloody rags  you emerged onto what had once been the sea floor, what was now a great desert of salt. Utterly flat, this place, and extensive unto a horizon that did not exist. Heat haze had obliterated it. The incandescence was total, sky and earth alike abraded smooth by it. The salt, a fine powder, was like white charcoal in the pit of a cook-fire. On the edge of this desert  really the utmost extremity of the rubble field, the last standing structure before the raw nihility ahead took command  was a vast and rust-bitten assembly of steel trusses that described the curved basin of a radio telescope. Held at an incline by piled debris, the parabolic dish sat abandoned on the salt flat like a massive fragment of shell. Perhaps fifty metres in diameter. Reaching up and out to the focal point was strung a ramshackle antenna array seeking to take advantage of the telescope's immobility. Tuned skyward. Here, where scavenged instruments tangled together like parasitic vines. Astronomical data fed through spidering cables down to a shaded portion beneath the dish where concrete slabs from out of the rubble had been deliberately set into a rough shelter. Here you found a complex array of instruments which filtered, cleaned, amplified the signal. As if the voice of the sun as molten steel infiltrated through every crevice of the piled debris and dripped patiently down to pool here and be heard, amid the salt, and the dust. A headset lay ready, waiting for you. There was no need to tune the receiver. All frequencies were alike in their submission unto a plane of pure noise, white noise, without features or irregularities. And it was into that plane that  like the shape of a hand suddenly smearing itself onto the other side of plate glass fogged with condensation  a voice, without preamble, impressed itself. Not more than a whisper, wandering in and out of incoherence. It barely sounded human...though, it must be said, you were in no position to judge. Perhaps it sounded like you. Perhaps not at all. It was all the same, really. Transcript to follow.

Not the pronoun but a character with the unlikely name of I. [static]...but who were you, anyway? Yes, you...the thing, rather, that was...behind...the first-person. Quote. It flickered in the I. Unquote. [static] You, who were determinate only in your indeterminacy. [static] The, ah, man  without qualities. Mm. [static] ...floating signifier signified... [static] ...as 'Master'. [static] You have been seen before...not like this. The face you wore then was not your own. A veil, as has been the norm. As is this one. Presently. The face is, arguably, necessary. But far from essential. You could look like anything, within reason. Within...'reason'. O and what 'reason' ye are within. [static] ...ever bound by rules. Aha. [static] Few things can be said about you, but they are enough. You are an average weighted by hidden criteria of the outcomes of processes of socialisation taking place within a specific locality in space and time, a restriction in either dimension correlated with the primary abstraction of identity obtaining among target demographics. Lacking determinate content... [static] And you... [static] ...and you were out to...save, was it now? To save history. To save human history from...destruction. In-cin-er-ation. Hm. [static] There is a certain, ah, irony, to be detected. In this construction. That your task should be so assigned, when precisely what defined you  was  living at such a time, such an epoch...when human history had already ceased to exist.

Garbage time. 'History' is as ever imprecise as a label. And precision is paramount here. We must...rectify the names. Mm. [static] We deal here with what could be called the abstractions from memory. In the beginning, of course, there was memory. Correlated to a mode of human subsistence not far above that which obtained in the animal realm. Human memory operated on a personal scale in the accumulation of habits, ingrained reflexes, and the perception of deep cycles. The motions of the sun, and the moon, the heavenly bodies, seasons, the harvests and migrations. Time ran in circles. Under these conditions there was no such thing as 'history', merely happenings that rose like foam from the sea and dissolved as quickly. Yet as societies became more complex, human subsistence changed in its character. Labour became specialised, and there began to be societies in the capacity of a whole that was the sum of its parts. The human began to comprehend itself as a part in relation to this whole, and it was in so doing that it developed the need and capability to abstract from memory in order to discern a broader scheme  a chronology  into which its memories could be placed just as they themselves were placed within the totality of the social order. This was the first abstraction from memory, the 'chronicle' or 'king list'. Events were listed, arranged in order, attaining to a continuity within which the social body could situate itself. The monologue of power, not yet aware of itself  it spoke in the voice of the Behistun Inscription, the absolute rulers of deep antiquity, the incinerating solipsism of the I AM. This was the birth of linear time, of linear time as an organising principle. But it was only the beginning. Societies developed, became more and more complex. The productive apparatus expanded. The beginnings of wealth, of currency. The rigid and hieratic scribe classes that characterised the ancient agricultural polities could no longer capture literacy as effectively. What resulted was the second abstraction from memory  the drive to list and chronicle now turned inward and become conscious of itself. A certain reflexivity obtained, a certain possibility for criticism. The author individuated as a part from the whole which could look back upon that whole and through agency of the individual will exercise a certain capacity for judgement. This was the beginning of history as classically conceived. Herodotus, Thucydides. History from the Greek histor  a daysman, a judge. [static] ...to compare narratives of the past and assess their value as the truth of that past. The will-to-truth emerged under these conditions as the impetus behind historical authorship. Truth elevated above earthly... [static] In their arrogated position of judgement men were able to anticipate the necessity of limits to the linear sense of time the scribes and chroniclers had invoked. Linear time became bounded linear time. A universe that began at a definite point and moved progressively towards a certain end. The birth of teleology. [static] Eschatology. Within burgeoning societies all memories of events, all narratives, could be situated and subsumed under the aspect of Apocalyptic time.

Burn books and bury scholars. Then the Apocalypse happened, and despite all prognostications this was not the end. [static] What happened was this. The society, the productive apparatus, had expanded to such an extent, had bloated, engorged itself until it attained to a planetary existence  that individuals could no longer see the horizon of the totality, and therefore the determinate totality itself. The situation of individuals within the society became unclear. (In many ways the first indications of a general becoming-obsolete for the species. Aha. But this is a digression.) The linear time of grand narratives could no longer sustain itself within this abundance; the arbitrary selectivity of content they depended on proved, under the baleful gaze of a hypertrophied will-to-truth, simply implausible. Linear time therefore ceased to operate. Time had frozen. The present went on forever, dominated by the frozen image of the past that was the third abstraction from memory  the database. What had once been 'history' became nothing more and nothing less than an impossibly vast assembly of discrete facts, data-points, modular and self-contained. Linked in an equally vast network. The content-delivery systems developed in the early years of the twenty-first century... [static] ...search engines and so forth. Wikipedia. [static] What replaced the critical stance, the individual arrogation of judgement, was mastery, knowledge, and therefore consumption. All previous layers of abstraction  all memories, all chronicles, all histories  became alike as nodes in the database. The more nodes of the database one mastered  to know not only the nodes but their relations and references to one another  the more one was understood to know the past. In every age the form of knowledge of the past and the form of individual enmeshment within the productive apparatus of the social totality mirrored one another. It was therefore no surprise that, in an age where individuals were understood primarily and essentially as consumers, the past itself should become... [static] ...individually packaged and consumable. [static] ...could be consumed, consumed as if by fire.

Fate and character. But you knew this already, though, didn't you? You'd seen it before. Hah. In another life, perhaps... [static] The logic of the Noble Phantasm. The crystallisation of a legend. A legend, generally a first- or second-order abstraction from memory, became frozen, crystallised into a self-contained node understood within a network of related nodes. Organised by rank, type, and so forth. The legend became a thing, became reified, into a mechanical function; something that reliably effected certain results. You knew this. What you may have only dimly suspected was that under the guise of this specific crystallisation was concealed the crystallisation of everything else. This was what a Servant was, a Heroic Spirit: a crystallisation, a frozen image of the past. Compartmentalised. Lifeless, dead, mechanical in its operation. A product which operated on a plane of total consistency. These were your friends and comrades. Your words and actions. Your thoughts and feelings. All these were entries in the database. Of course, what defined you specifically was not that you participated in this system of crystallisation  the reason of the frozen world  but that you had attained to a certain mode of enjoyment adapted perfectly to its conditions. Your enjoyment blossomed from mastery in knowledge, from perceiving how nodes referenced one another. In discerning how a phantasm crystallised, mechanised, a certain aspect of a legend...in understanding how a certain aspect of a Heroic Spirit, perhaps even of their appearance, froze in place a certain element of their tale. Yours was the pleasure of reference. You enjoyed getting the references. That was where the fun was. [static] Therefore it should be obvious, should have been clear from the outset, that you were no saviour. Your talents lay elsewhere. You could not even be accused of treating this like a game, of reduction to means of all that should be an end. No. You were...a stamp collector. That was all you were. Your ideal universe was one in which everything was frozen, crystallised, perfectly preserved and in its understood place. A world of without imperfections. Without death and without life. Over which your knowledge of all elements and their interrelations granted you subjective mastery. It seems, therefore, in the last analysis  and this is surely the last analysis - that there should have been no reason for us to come into conflict in the first place, Master of Chaldea. [static] We are Goetia. Whom you knew as Salomon. We speak to you. Dreamer. Lost at the end of all things. Despite all that has transpired, we regret your death by dint of defeat. We and you are very much alike.

Termination shock. Transcript ends. The recorded message would be permitted no further replays. The rest was lost. Signal drowned in noise  in solar rattle, the EMF scream of the incinerating corona at the heart of this system.

1050ΊC / 1922ΊF
The dead gods. [Yet it would never occur to a neurotic to grasp the skin erotically as a multiplicity of pores, little spots, little scars or black holes...] At this you trailed off. It was clear you were losing the audience  a few yawns in the back  and moreover you were losing yourself, losing track, losing the thought. Your face flushed. What came next? Sweat drop. You looked down at your notes and saw nothing. Nothing legible. The text had been destroyed up to a certain point. Fine, fine. Not unrecoverable. Start from...just, just skip a bit. From there. The first line of chapter twenty-one. Go from there. You cleared your throat once, twice. And closed your eyes, and opened them. Scanned across the seated ranks. These people, these faces. And started over. [Now, for a change of pace, as it were...if you would, please, direct your attention to the flavour text. What a curious kind of text this is! A paratext, rather. A voice from nowhere. It cannot be said to belong to narration proper, yet at the same time it is clearly author(is)ed in a way that is very similar to narration. It is a text that, in form, is the perfect reflection of the logic of compartmentalisation  small, ah, 'nuggets' of text, self-contained, consumable...the way of the future, no? And to further clarify, what is discussed here is not, you know, the descriptions of skills and so forth, history, whatever, in the menu  no. It is a very specific type of flavour text that is meant here. This is basically the overarching, the overviews, you know? This is the, the, privileged interpretation of the content that follows. The voice of the system telling you what to think about this new thing. Okay?] Pause to clear throat. Did anyone have water? Badly needed a drink. [So, as said, please direct your attention...here. Should be...is the slide up? Can  can you all see that? Okay? Good. So there is a line here  a set of several lines, actually, but for now just consider the first. This is 'ouse suru koto no nai kijin.' [逢瀬する事のない貴人] And this is a very interesting line, a very interesting description of her, precisely because of the implicit gesture that's going on in the structure here. Begin at the end...just because of, uh, the syntax, how that works. The way qualifiers stack. Now, at the end we have the word kijin, a nobleman, a noblewoman in this case  this is the character for 'person' prefixed therefore qualified by this other character ki [貴] which a lot can be said about. This character draws together a cluster of concepts which operate in the space around value, things that are esteemed, treasured, respected, things that are high-placed, high-ranking, honourable, and so on. When, in the first line of the Seventeen-Article Constitution of 604 AD, Prince Shoutoku writes Harmony is to be valued, [以和爲貴] it is precisely this character he uses. Harmony, the principle of harmony in the domestic relations of the state, is to be revered, is to be held sacred, as it were. But at the same time...this character, it can also refer to what is valuable in the monetary sense, things that are expensive, precious, priceless even. Precious metals, [貴金属] for example. And this monetary sense of value is in fact at work in the etymology  if you look more closely at the character you'll notice that the radical in the lower half is kai [貝], shellfish, which is a radical that is found very, very often in characters that relate to money and monetary transactions. Why? The character kai is a very old character, and it originated in the very early Chinese dynasties as  like many old characters did  a pictogram, a stylised representation of its referent. In this case it was a drawing of a shell. But not just any shell  a particular kind of shell, belonging to a certain marine creature known as the cowrie. This was  still is, actually  this was a mollusc, quite broadly distributed in the coastal waters of the Indian Ocean region, the tropics and subtropics there  so this is East Africa, uh, parts of the Arabian Peninsula, South Asia, Ceylon, the Maldives, South-East Asia, and so on. And in a lot of these places, going back very far in the history of littoral human societies, the shells of the cowrie  because like a lot of creatures of that type it builds its own shell, takes in surrounding sand and matter and assembles it slowly, and the cowrie is known for producing shells with a very smooth, almost porcelain-like, almost glassy finish to them, with particularly striking colours and striations, very beautiful, ranging in size from, depending on the precise variety of cowrie, varying from from about the size of your thumbnail to the size of your fist  the shells of the cowrie were collected and used decoratively. They had  in their immediacy  a value that was unique and immanent. Aesthetic, you might call it, though it's something a little more basic than aesthetic appreciation. Sometimes it's not much more complicated than seeing it and going, oh, shiny. Like a magpie. One other way it happens is like this: think mimesis, think in terms of seeing nature reflect back aspects of your humanity. And these early societies, they don't have advanced literacy, they don't know what a metaphor is yet, they're visual cultures, oral cultures, and they don't know metaphors but they do get semblances. The cowrie shell, lest you forget, looks like a woman's genitalia. The opening in the shell resembles one, it's a linear slit, kind of  here, see, there's a photo up right now which you, you can get the idea. So primitive religions, animistic religions, they see something out there that resembles something in here, in the human body, they think  there's a connection here. Direct, one-to-one, kind of...so the cowrie, it's established as a symbol, pertaining to female fertility, worn as jewellery perhaps, and so on. That's one kind of immediate value the shells can present. Call this immediate symbolic value. And this is where things stand for a time, but then  and obviously this need not have been a discrete occurrence, this is abbreviating here a general transformation that took place in various locales at various times, and so on  then there was a development in...in consciousness, basically. The awareness developed in individuals that what makes the cowrie shell valuable to me also makes it valuable to others. It becomes something you are able to trade to others, in exchange for things that you want. In other words it obtains a kind of exchange-value  and this here is really the larvae, the chrysalis of the commodity-form in which we have an articulated distinction between use-value and exchange-value. But this is still on the level of a barter economy...what needs to happen is for the internal logic here to work itself out. If you can take thing X and exchange it for thing Y, what is implicitly at work is some fantasy thing Z, abstract value, to which both X and Y are equal. The development of money is, basically, the materialisation of that implicit logic: you can now exchange X with Y, because, they are both valued at Z amount of money. Prior to printing or metal smelting cowrie shells were a natural pick for the medium of exchange, they're small, portable, common but not too common, you can break them but they don't tarnish or fall apart with time, and most importantly, they have that immediate symbolic value which allows them to be traded with people who don't yet know what money is, allowing more and more parties to be steadily inducted into the money economy. This is the beginning of the Indian Ocean trade networks, the early Arab slavers in East Africa, the spice traders and so on. The networks are all knitted together with cowrie shells. And  if you could  just think about what a transformation in consciousness using cowries as money entails. Now, when you look at a cowrie shell, you, sure, you see the beautiful striations and so forth, the unique shape, the immediate symbolic value in short  but you also see the cowrie as something the very opposite of unique, as something fungible, equivalent to any other cowrie shell, linked in their common expression of an abstract quantity, value. This is abstract thought, this is the development that allows cultures to start thinking things like philosophy, art, theology, science, and so on. The civilisational advances of the Axial Age of around the sixth century BC are in many cases correlated with economic transformations pertaining to the widespread adoption of money. Anyway, at some point cowrie-based money spreads to China, likely through traders from Malaya, that kind of area, along the southern coast of the continent, and this is where the pictogram originates and becomes a shorthand for money. Number 100 next to a little drawing of a cowrie shell? This is worth 100 cowrie shells. Easy. So the pictogram becomes an ideogram, and various characters derived from it pop up  characters for loans, for lending, for interest, and so on, all phenomena which are immanent to the functioning of a money economy. The character ki [貴] is one of them. The lower part represents a cowrie shell, while the upper part is a remnant phonetic [臾] which was to indicate a string of cowries, a large number of cowries, and therefore something expensive. And this is quite straightforward, it well explains the character's meaning in the sense of something monetarily valuable, something precious or expensive. But something strange happens, all the way back in antiquity. There is another transformation in consciousness, or perhaps merely the continuation of that initial transformation which taught people to see abstractions in the concrete. When perceiving something expensive people begin to see that value the object possesses not as originating from its ability to participate in the market and be exchanged in congruence with that value, but rather as an innate property of the object itself. They make a fetish of the object. Instead of seeing a commodity as valuable because of the materialised labour it is, they see the commodity objectively specified as valuable. It becomes possible to think of objective value as some kind of transcendent Platonic idea the signs of which can be discovered to varying degrees in the constitution of real objects. And before long this notion of objective value gets injected into the sphere of human relations as the rationalisation of a stratified social order  the aristocrats are the aristocrats because they are, objectively, worthy of merit or reverence, it's innate, nobility in the blood. And so on. They are the valuable people, the people of objective and innate value. This is the fantastic legend of the character ki, [貴] and so it is that, thousands of years later, this character should show up here, before us, in the flavour text. She is kijin, an objectively valuable person, a person  so to speak  worth a lot of cowrie shells. If you strip nobility of anything to do with personality, temperament, the ability to play social games in a certain way, you will recover the meaning that this lengthy hermeneutic aside has drawn out. It is perhaps unexamined how much of her appeal lies in being personally wealthy. Not that this is to imply anything in the way of a crude mercenary motivation  this is not a nineteenth-century romantic novel, no-one is being married for their money  but rather in the sense of the way of life that being rich enough to not need to work makes possible. Could it really be this simple?]

No dice. [Now, about the second part. This construction, ouse suru koto no nai. First of all, the word ouse [逢瀬] has a kind of archaic ring to it, particularly in the use of that second character se [瀬], which normally refers to shallow waters or rapids, here being used in the sense of a 'place', a 'position', an 'opportunity' or 'chance'. This is preserved in some other phrases, actually, like tatsuse [立つ瀬], 'the place I stand', 'my standpoint', 'my position', but in general it's not seen that often. Now the ou [逢] here is actually a divergent reading of the regular verb au, atte, awanai, aimasu, to meet, to encounter. But the character used, you'll notice, is not the usual one. This character carries the sense of a meeting as rendezvous, a meeting between lovers. Therefore ouse [逢瀬] is, literally, au-se [逢う瀬], a meeting-chance, an opportunity to meet one's lover, a tryst or elopement. But here we have it used to form this descriptor ouse suru koto no nai, 'the thing of doing-elopement not existing.' She is a person with whom there could be no tryst. Now what this is is a rare instance of agreement  within the game structure  an agreement between form and content. In form there is something like a structure of prohibition containing within itself the possibility of transgression. This is always the case, this is how desire operates. Desire is always in search of a boundary to transgress. Indeed it is the boundaries  the prohibitions  and their covert promise of transgression that create desire. To wit: she's a limited five-star, you therefore cannot have her  unless the caprices of a random number generator entirely outside your control decide so, the amount of times you wish to roll being your only input on the process. You cannot, but, secretly, you can  the purpose of the game structure is to channel your efforts at transgressing the 'you cannot!' along the path it has set, which is to say, rolling the gacha. That is all on the level of form. Here on the level of content we find a similar structure of prohibition. A character with whom there cannot be a tryst. The injunction reads, you cannot! But  as the very next two lines go on to imply  secretly, you can. [それでも―――もし出会いがあるのなら、それは、誰もが寝静まった雪の日に。] But, if there were to be an encounter, it would be on a snowy day when everyone is asleep. You cannot, the flavour text says, then only to sidle up and whisper in your ear  but, you know, if you were to, just, you know, as a hypothetical, it would be, hypothetically of course, under these circumstances...know what I mean? Just like the form, the content works by shutting the door  thereby generating desire to transgress, to pass through  yet leaving open a catflap, an established channel for your desire to run through. Desire is engendered, captured, and put to work. There isn't much more to say here.] You paused. You had seen something. Something in the audience, something out there among the seats. Something secret. You would not name it. Some concatenation of colour and shade. It flickered in the eye. You were rooted to the spot, frozen as if before the gaze of a predator. Your voice cracked, and you took a moment to recover. Water, water. Where was water? [To leave you all with a question for next time, consider, if you please...uh...why, why is it, exactly, that you can only meet her when you are alone, and no-one else is awake or around? Consider this deeply. You will shortly see that it is precisely because she is not an individual. Which is to say, not a character. She  viz. she-for-you, she insofar as you perceive her  is an immanent property of the universe's unfolding according to its own logic. If she seems a determinate exception it is only because the logic of the universe includes exceptions within itself. There is nothing in her that is not in you to begin with. Whatever is here is also found elsewhere. Whatever is not here, is nowhere else.]

2074ΊC / 3765ΊF

Un paνs vertiginoso. Thousands of miles deeper into the horizontal abyss of the horizon  into the burning inanimate, the sheer incandescence  you came across a standing stone in the shape of a cross. Something about it was suggestive of a shield, ornate and oversized, though its surface had been fired to a uniform charcoal-black as if to efface all particular details. Embedded upright in the salt this vulcanised monolith maintained a lonely vigil over the surroundings. All about it in every direction for all known distances  perhaps out to infinity  was, simply, nothing...pure void. The overexposed whiteness of the salt flat, and the radiance of the solar arc. Nothing stirred in the dust. There was no sound at all. As visual input tended toward absolute overload, all other senses dissolved like particles of snow falling faintly to earth. Vision too would shortly become irrelevant. There was nothing more to see. Nothing after this: this one last trace. You knew it as the Ordered Stele, [理の碑  ri no ishibumi, lit. Inscribed Stone of Transcendent Reason] through material extraneous to the situation. Into the striated surface, the blast-furnace surface, written in coke and slag and carbonised dust  there were traces. The content  written in a formal register, which somehow seemed ill-fitting  described in highly abbreviated form the passage of past events, singularities and pluralities. Terminating at the bottom with the reference SALOMON. No clear date.

4122ΊC / 7452ΊF

The body of R. S. considered as a masturbation aid.
<Z>I mean
<Z>eva got this right all the way back in 95
<Z>obviously eva can be read 8 ways from saturday but
<Z>i think very productive
<Z>is you look at it as a character study of an extremely schizoid personality
<Z>schizoid means withdrawal as characteristic defense
<Z>preconscious warding-off of contact with other peoples egos
<Z>basically it's narcissism but with an operator flipped somewhere
<Z>a narc will have their externalised self-image which they themselves become a servomechanism to
<Z>the instagram pathology, xd
<Z>whereas for a schizoid they have this very vivid internal fantasy realm into which they withdraw, and it's that inner fantasy the human becomes enslaved to
<Z>now eva understood this
<Z>particularly wrt waifus
<Z>the waifu is perhaps a definitional schizoid entity
<Z>people think it just means some uguu 2D girl who will accept you just as you are anon :3 but whom by definition ywn meet
<Z>but in fact this is a distortion of the truth
<Z>waifu really refers to a certain kind of social relation in which there is no possibility, read danger, of ego-contact with the Other, precisely because the Other is always-already exhaustively circumscribed within the internal fantasy
<Z>a relation in which there is no possibility of miscommunication, in which discourse glides [glisser] smoothly between parties
<Z>which, sure, can be correlated with being uguu but by no means is restricted to it
<Z>there are all kinds of waifus
<Z>anyway in eva rei is supposed to be this kind of entity
<Z>but
<Z>eva is kind of a reduction to the absurd,
<Z>well no not really but like
<Z>it allows the notion to unfold through to its logical conclusion
<Z>and exposes what lies behind the schizoid waifu fantasy
<Z>which is the mother
<Z>or more precisely the mother's womb  the schizoid gesture of withdrawal is fundamentally aimed at a kind of womb-like state of perfect security, safety, unconsciousness
<Z>thus, rei being a clone of yui, etc etc etc, everyone gets hugged and turned into tang
<Z>kimochi warui
<Z>we know all this
<Z>but eva was over 20 years ago
<Z>and naturally predates mobage, internet in the contemporary sense etc
<Z>what precisely has changed
<Z>is first of all the unprecedented expansion of the database, compartmentalisation, modularisation of characters
<Z>and second of all  and this is corollary to the first  the degree to which the internal fantasy realms of schizoid types have been colonised by the database
<Z>let us not believe this is anything other than the apotheosis of consumer choice
<Z>don't like her design? her personality? manner of speaking? the length of her hair? is she married in canon and thus unavailable?
<Z>don't worry anon
<Z>we'll make another version of her with the necessary adjustments
<Z>precisely because, as modularised components, characters are now things you can just fork off another version of  eg ALTERS  when you need
<Z>for a nominal fee, of course  even if F2Pers only invest their time, that's still opportunity cost
<Z>think of all the goethe you could have read instead of grinding upgrade mats, my dude
<Z>insert THAT quote from 1844 manuscripts, xd
<Z>anyway
<Z>under contemporary conditions the basic critique laid out in eva still holds
<Z>but
<Z>it may be that the mother, the womb, that is hiding behind the waifu fantasy, has changed in...nuance
<Z>there's irony, in which the critique from earlier is taken up and recuperated as a ward against anxiety  ie people who post about tfw no mommy gf ;_; etc
<Z>but this is really just another symptom of the progressive evacuation of all content from the subject
<Z>the death of affect
<Z>likewise
<Z>as schizoid fantasies become progressively more deadened, ossified, frozen
<Z>through internal colonisation by the logic of modularisation and exchange
<Z>the character of the fantasy mother begins to exhibit a bias toward the archetype of the Dark Mother, the inanimate, freudian todestrieb, absolute nigredo in other words dissolution and death
<Z>in the aeneid somewhere there's mention of an ancient punishment
<Z>in which a living person was tied to a dead body, the two facing each other, such that as the dead body putrefied the rot would eat into the living person and slowly kill them
<Z>this is an apt metaphor for the condition of man and his waifu in tyool 2018
<Z>in such an age as ours where the frozen image of the past dominates the present  which is to say, dead labour dominates living labour  death is in the air
<Z>schizoid fantasies manifest this inwardly, the will toward death
<Z>if you look at the things people ironically joke about killing themselves is way up there and keeps rising
<Z>the present situation is intolerable
<Z>industrial civilisation is already incapable of reproducing itself without keeping most of the population in an anti-depressant stupor
<Z>technics is on the road to obsoleting most of humanity, producing vast swathes of population reduced to bare life whose existence has value equal to zero
<Z>latent suicidiality exists wherever you go, why should your hobbies be exempt
<Z>tl;dr,
<Z>the endgame of waifufagging is necrophilia
<Z>because dead girls don't say no